Empire of Ashes
by Andrea Foxx
Summary: After centuries of Ganondorf's rule, the King of Evil falls. Unfortunately, in the span of his kingship he prompted creation of a world that, when he rises again, is not one he is able to conquer. And not one that should ever have existed in the first place, and with its connection to the heavens failing, not one likely to survive for much longer. Eventual GanZel, adventure focus.
1. Press Start

The castle town remained silent as a tomb. Months of cruel Hyrulian snow had battered it, iced it over into a frigid, silent skeleton. Every street was picked clean: not a single soul dared leave their homes that winter morning. Black woolen curtains and wooden shutters barred every window, though Ganondorf knew that eyes stared out of cracks and slits in the drapes. Those with honed-glasses would be squinting through them, doubtlessly. The sun rose over the eastern mountains, bright but cold.

The Tyrant King's fingers crushed around a frozen throat. His breath steamed, and chapped lips split a raw, toothy smile. "One-hundred more years of rule! One hundred more years for my throne!" he boomed, sorcerous voice echoing in every dark corner of his great kingdom. "Your hero of this age is dead!"

The bloody corpse he held aloft could barely considered human: mangled and nearly dismembered. As proof of identity, Ganondorf thrust his right hand into the air, clutching the Master Sword. The holy magics within constantly rejected his touch, fought... but gripped in the grasp of Power its strength was simply not enough to repel him.

The castle town had no answer, but to his satisfaction, Ganondorf could see the few candles in windows flicker out. As he set the body in his clutches alight, he thought: this time, I will make sure that in a hundred years, not one of them even _remembers_ the _concept _of a 'hero,' or of the Triforce. I will burn every book. I will silence every song. I have killed the princess, ended her line, and now the last Hero is gone. I am all that will remain.

And as he laughed atop his highest tower, he never heard the sound of a bowstring in the bailey. He never saw the golden arrow as it plunged into the back of his neck.

But no one in Castle Town could miss their tyrant of three centuries plummet to the stone below. Before he died, Ganondorf cursed his greatest miscalculation.

He had not even entertained that this latest Princess Zelda, red with fury and so young, could have already left behind a daughter.

–  
_So an age of despair ended in Hyrule, and an age of peace began._


	2. 1

_… Life! After so long, breath! Fire! Immolation! Death._

_…_  
_… Life! Body and blood! Sulphur! Smoke! Char and embers! Death._

_…_  
_... Life! Sensation! Magma in his eyes! Scorching his bones, Crushing! A thousand molten tons in the crucible! Death._

After countless failures, the Great King of Evil pulled himself out of the fuming caldera of Death Mountain. A thousand burns scored and blackened his body, skin not much more than a seared tatter. Nearly paralyzed, in the throes of yet another terrible death, Ganondorf slid down the ashy slope. Tiny flecks of black earth-glass and rough igneous rock shredded him, yet it took twenty full yards before the char and cooked flesh abraded away to reveal something that could still bleed.

Compared to what felt like an eon of fire and death, and many other sufferings before that, this agony was nothing. His strength was gone, but his will was still stronger than iron. The smoky clouds atop Death Mountain grew heavy as he cried out, an inexorable mental call, to pure, primal darkness.

_**Come to me! All that are within my power, I summon you to my side!**_

The answer was... lackluster.

_**Nothing...? Why do you not answer? How dare you forsake me!**_

And so he lay, dying on the side of the darkened mountain. Kargarocs screeched overhead, anticipating a poor, scorched meal. With the greatest agony, Ganondorf's fingers slowly clenched around a handful of sharp soot-soil. He did not notice as sharp beaks began to dig into him, feasting.

_My Lord?_

It was the faintest reply: only a mirage's voice, something out of oblivion and faraway. His demand, stretching deep into the most forgotten expanse of the Void, had found at least one. He could see, could touch, could reach out to this one. His mirror image, his own double.

_**I remember you. My phantom, a doppelganger of my youth... I sent you away in an ancient age, for your great failure. Even now, you remain loyal?**_

_Yes. You created me. I have waited faithfully as the centuries passed, My Lord. I have no other purpose._

_**Very well... You may again approach me. I call you back into this world.  
**_

The shadows, knowing their eternal master, swept away before his wishes. Soon, the phantom stood tall before his broken, bird-eaten, immobile king.

_I am to serve._

Blistered grin twisted. In the last crack of voice, he spoke. "And so you shall."

The phantom stared into his dark lord, and Ganondorf stared back. Without a will of its own, the creature could not complain as his master's essence poured through the connection between them. Empty darkness within the doppleganger's shell was forced out. As flesh and hot blood grew within that hollow likeness, the white-bone mask affixed to it's gruesome face cracked asunder. Without that obstruction, its features quickly crunched, tightened, and shifted to become his own once more. Bone splintered, skin stretched: the King of Evil was seeded, pupated, and finally was realized.

Restored, his laughter shook the hellish mountain. Below him, the weak awareness of his summoned servant cowered within the charred body on the ground. He had easily switched places with it, reclaimed its form as his own. A heavy iron-shot boot snapped the husk's neck, and it's eyes went dark.

The final fate of a body double.

"Now! Gods! Shadows! I will take this age for myself! Move this earth in my will!"

However his voice snarled with glee, the volcano's scorching indifference was all that he met. Holding aloft his mighty hand that had once commanded the stones of mountains and the sun in the sky, he now boomed with rage,

"This peak of fire _will_ burn forth! It _will _rain flame upon my enemies! Damn you! I am your king!"

Through the smoke and the smog, murky light upon that _almighty _hand lit as it shriveled, died, crumbled into ash. Dark blood dripped from a wound, cut clean through bone and sinew. The edges were raw and clean, but the flow slow... as if inflicted post-mortem. His divine power was gone with a fresh wound, centuries old inflicted on his desecrated corpse: a wound that lingered through the ages, now reflected upon him. Sympathetic magic. How he despised it.

His voice did not shake the earth and sky, dispelled on the sulfurous air. But even with a mortal tongue, the words rolled like thunder.

"WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?"

–

The land of the living wasn't quite what he expected. Cloaked, Ganondorf felt the cold eyes of guards at the great white gate as he passed. He bent beneath them, snarling. They stood straight, aloof. No army was there to divert their gaze.

Not a single beast was left. No shadows skulked in Hyrule's night. Not so much as a single cursed bat. The only sound following him was that of a merchant's donkey and cart. But, this he swore: army or not, title or not, he would see the capital of Hyrule. He would see his stain- surely, after three hundred years in power...?

There was nothing. Shops made passable trade. The winter sky was bright. In the center of the market square, the Hero towered: stone blade thrust to the heavens.

Hyrule loomed. I have won, it whispered. His great bulk huddled, his maimed arm slung, Ganondorf seemed to shrink. That wouldn't do. Looking into loathsome granite face, he straightened. The crowd scattered, gazes snapped to him...

His aching stump stung and burned. Try as he might to raze this place, the power wasn't there.

No. Not here, not now. He didn't have it yet, he needed it, it was the difference between mass murder and dominion... he ducked out of the square, a cripple once more.

He knew these streets. They hadn't changed, but it had been some time since he'd seen it from this perspective. In his mind, he traced the steps from the view on high, his old tower. Although he knew a view of every back street, from that perspective he'd now be as tiny as an insect.

Looking over his shoulder, the castle's highest turret rose like a monolith. He ducked out of sight, in the shadow of a nearby guardhouse. For the life of him, he couldn't fathom why there was a guardhouse built over the entrance to the Temple of Time. Suddenly, he felt lost, in hostile territory.

He smuggled himself in, unnoticed among the other pilgrims. His mind traveled back, back, reaching deep into the past. He'd once been a king of thieves, he'd once learned the art of burglary. It had never been to his taste. He'd raided and pillaged instead. As far as he was concerned, skulking and surveying a target was the realm of his sisters. It was young girls' work. It was for the freshly un-maidened: spying a powerful target, taking note of an exit plan, enticing him to bed, and then making off into the night with his riches. It was no business for a king.

But it was a means to an end. From the heavy stone doorway the Temple of Time had not changed much. A few pilgrims prayed before the grand altar. For a closer look, he too approached and knelt.

His insincerity hardly mattered. Beyond the grand altar, the Door of Time was wide open: the room within now a sanctuary. The Master Sword and the key to the heavens...

gone.

The temple bell rang six times, and the pilgrims stood and filed out. Realizing he would stand out if he remained behind, Ganondorf stood and attached himself to the line. The guards let them out one at a time. Before Ganondorf they froze, unyielding.

It only took half a minute for the Dark Lord's patience to wane, his act to fall. "Stand aside."

Silently, they faced him. Acrid fury (panic?) climbed high in his throat, he rose from his imposed hunch and lifted his good hand. Smite them! Kill them! The urge slithered in his blood, and he wanted to. But no, he insisted. There is no army! I have no stronghold! I am not ready! I cannot win in my current state.

Even if he knew he could. He could win, if he gave in to that urge. It had never failed before. For the first time, the mental disconnect was palpable. After unpleasantly wrestling a destructive magic blast away from his own grasp, he still could not contain the act of violence: backhanding the nearest guard instead. Even as the man went flying, Ganondorf was not exactly sure what had transpired, for his own heartbeats protested, demanded, _raged._..

A new guard had stepped in to fill the gap. Ganondorf's knuckles stung and his head spun: the earthly pain kissing him with a bruise; although for a moment foreign it soon reintroduced itself as a lost, abusive friend welcoming him back to a great, shared slum. Mortality. How he missed privilege: the great wealth of the gods!

It was a blur, burning through him. His veins were smoke. Escape! Kill! Bide! Survive! Destroy! Withdraw!

Too late. All demands suddenly ceased. In a kind of quiet haze, Ganondorf pulled the arrow out of himself. It reeked of the heavens, seared his fingers.

The queenly marksman saw him fall.


	3. 2

Ganondorf thundered on the door of the small, circular room. His good fist slammed on the solid hardwood, rattling the heavy iron hinges. A lesser man might have observed only the sturdiness of the door; the once-king-of-thieves could feel no fewer than four solid steel locks and he smelled sawdust shook free. The door had very recently been augmented with iron reinforcements, and the steel hinges invoked a vault.

All of that was nothing, really. To a sorcerer as he, iron bolts and locks were a parlor trick. He could rend them with one hand. Not that he had much choice. But with each strike his knuckles crackled on a pale, humming barrier. It drew sparks and bruised his skin. Of course, he half snarled, half grinned. Ward the door all you want. It won't help. Of course fastidious, fool Hylians would think a man leaves only through the designated exit.

His magic blast singed his fingertips as it left his grasp. His control was greatly reduced in his off-hand— he'd never seen the need. His leer stretched as he saw it impact cold stone, and he laughed when he heard the clap of thunder. He ducked when he saw it rebound back at his face. It crashed against the far wall, vaporizing some of the wall hangings that kept away the draft. Momentum lost, it bounced only a little ways the second time: powdering a wooden basin and steaming the water as it did so. By the third reflection it was only a fizzing ball of sparks that burned up in an instant. Ganondorf stamped out the resulting fire before it could spread.

Closer inspection revealed a gaol. The work was too delicate for Ganondorf's taste, and would be easily shattered if he had any vantage point to speak of. He could recognize seven distinct points in the work... and then he slumped on the bed angrily. The Seven Sages and their power had long since faded from the world. Seeking them out in the Sacred Realm and harnessing their strength would have been a ridiculous task. One that would have taken years to carry out, one that even he had failed at in in his long, long lifetime. The very idea that someone, even the damnable princess could do it would have been laughable. If he hadn't been trapped like a scorpion under a heavenly cup.

The walls arched overhead. Ganondorf could feel them constrict: a primal fear. Suddenly, he was crushing under magma and death, pinned like an insect to a board, suffocated in a stone tomb. In a half-dream state, he broke himself against the walls, yelling incoherently. Perhaps a hundred miles away inside his own head, he looked on with baffled eyes at his own blind wrath. There is nothing to gain, he insisted. He slammed with all his might anyway. There must be some other way out! Ganondorf's fingers bled all the same.

Night had fallen before he fell exhausted into the bed. It creaked ominously under his weight. He had barely noticed the time: it had slipped by in a frenzy of NO and DESTROY. Not one of his finer moments, he admitted. No one lived to remember it, nor had many known it in the first place, but the apocryphal last king of the Gerudo had once had a little problem with _panic._

One divinity out of three, he cursed. And only because of the tiniest character flaw. Besides that, he thought, he surely was ideal.

The room was dark. The tiny window, not much more than an arrow slit, let a thin beam of starlight in, precisely at the right place to pierce into his eyes. Ganondorf lifted himself from the bed heavily and pushed it with his foot a few degrees to the left in irritation. The heavy oak screamed on the stone floor, doubtlessly leaving ugly streaks. Not even caring about his boots, Ganondorf abused the bed once again, burying his face in the rough, clean linens. All at once, he became aware of a vague stinging in his back. Ah yes, he remembered. He'd been shot. How frenzy dulls the senses. At least the arrowhead had been extracted, and the wound sewn shut. He didn't feel any aching; he suspected it had been dressed with powerful medicines. There was only the eerie prickling sensation of scar flesh too raw and new to have formed entirely without magical aid.

His mind contorted, creaking in disuse. She wanted him alive, did she? The issue of 'why' was not even remotely relevant. To him, his most important question was, 'for how long?'

Because she would kill him or at least try, he knew. That truth was so plain to him it was barely conscious. It is simply what she did. There was no reason to doubt the evidence of countless times before.

He felt his instinct for survival begin to flare once more. Run! Escape! Kill her first!

No, he mandated. Sleep.

But he didn't sleep until a presence that had been loitering unseen behind the door vanished into the night. Ganondorf knew when he was being watched. And he knew from experience not to close his eyes when assassins practically stood at his bedside.

Experience sending assassins, anyway. Not experience receiving them.

–

When he awoke, he was surprised to find a neat plate of food at his bedside. His guts growled, and before he knew what was happening, the plate's contents were down his gullet and away. Mortal bodies were such demanding things, he thought. The dish vanished as soon as he put it down empty.

Interesting, he thought. How much time did it take to construct such an intricate cage? And how much foresight?

He began to wonder more about his prison. From the singed bookshelf, Ganondorf pulled a variety of volumes. "What weapons did she leave me?" he muttered, weighing them in his hand. Quickly he was disappointed. None of the books contained anything new to him; they were all blank, or common knowledge. There were a few elementary magic tomes, current maps, and tales for children.

Ganondorf unfolded the thick leaves of vellum maps, a cumbersome feat with only five fingers. The edges of his raw wound still stung, clotted and tender, and he could not use that arm even as a brace. For a while, he stared at the maps, wondering what foreign country they could possibly depict; the countries on all sides were foreign. Hyrule's old neighbors were missing, borders unfamiliar, and landmarks exotic. He rotated the maps until their edges met, and stepped back. Squinting, he adjusted for scale.

As he originally suspected, it was Hyrule. But not the Hyrule he knew, in the least. It had grown, absorbing surrounding provinces until almost twice its original size. The great field's border had changed, and the lake had dried, withering in its banks, while a displaced river cut through mountain passes and spilled into the desert to form a vast swamp. Sand still dominated the northwest: the rock mesas, weathered Gerudo relics, and barren badlands that were shot through with ancient streaks of rust and cobwebbed mineshafts: the last remnants of some forgotten empire dead for unknown ages of men. Acres of southeast forest had been hewn into two distinct surviving woods, but the trees had crept west along the borders of Hyrule, spidering into abandoned hills that hadn't even been Hyrulian last he'd walked the earth. Death Mountain's crater had sent up sister vents, pockmarking the mountains to the north.

It was the river that signaled he had been away for more than the usual century or half-century or so. The time required for the mighty and deep-cut river to swell and form a water passage under mountains that kept the clouds from the dune sea...

He estimated no less than five hundred years. With help, possibly Zoran. Without help? Hundreds upon hundreds of years and so far beyond the realm of feasibility he discarded the possibility. He was not sure that he would have spoken the same language as Hyrule's inhabitants if he had been gone for a millennium or more. Already the written characters had changed slightly: simplifying.

Ganondorf swept the maps aside as well and sat heavily on the bed. He could hear the dull roar of the castle's life far below, and the howling of the frosted wind through the chink in his wall. There was no fireplace nor wood to burn, and for the first time in a very long while, the chill penetrated his skin. But not his core, not his memory. There was too much heat in recent memory for that, and each death-in-fire now had a scale of time, context.

"You could not remove Power, so you removed my hand, and cast me into flame. You defy the heavens' will that I rise again," he marveled, gritting his teeth in hatred. "Instead of locking my everlasting life away, you chose to seal me in a trap of mortality."

Ganondorf hated his ancient nemesis, Zelda. But one could not say he did not respect her will. In the volcano, she'd found a way to dispense with Ganondorf automatically, binding him to the stone as his body was remade by divine mandate... to be cremated immediately. None before in his long and hole-marked memory had been so bold.

Open on the bed next to him was the thin volume of children's rhymes.

A hero in green marched forth through it, into nearly every tale, his deeds legendary. A goddess, a queen stood by his side, advising him through every story.

Ganondorf's mention was that of a thief and a killer. Anonymous, he was a great darkness. He sat atop a tower, simply one demon or blight-bringer defeated in only a page and quickly discarded: thrown into a great pit of flame. An unglamorous role. Disposed of like garbage. And she, Zelda, had made sure every child knew it. But not his name. Not his glory, or conquest. His defeat. In that page, he was a small man. All seven feet of sorcery and shadow, reduced in myth to a footnote to the glory of others.

When he next came-to, it was hours later, he had a new bruise across his knuckles, and the barrier was no worse for wear. He was hungry again, as well. Ganondorf was sure he'd thrown a fit, but not quite sure how he'd missed it. He'd been too angry to know. He sat up to look at the handiwork of his own wrath. The bookshelf was a pile of ash.

Cursing, he laid back on the bed, nursing his good hand. Trust me, he thought, to destroy my one remedy for boredom because it offended me.

–

The barrier was hot as Ganondorf leaned against it, but without temperature or fire. Only he felt its gnawing, but the man pressed on all the same. It was like plunging into an icy pool, he reasoned: even if it was a shock, perhaps he could acclimate. Then, he thought, only the physical repulsion of its strength would hold him; Ganondorf would not allow this cage to become a weapon. Visions of it shrinking around him, crushing and burning him to ash, haunted him in what he suspected was a vague paranoia.

The light of a heavenly sun bit to his core, however, and unlike chill waters it did not get any easier to withstand.

"You know this is a waste of our time," he rasped to the silent guard hei _knew/i_must stand before his door. For the thousandth time, his words fell upon the wall, without a reply. Yet, he'd had one reaction. He'd made the man jump; he'd heard it. A bead of sweat inched down Ganondorf's temple. Maybe he was confined, but he was not silenced.

He'd tried every stratagem, save the last. He grit his teeth and finally tried his least favorite ploy.

"Please answer me. I wither behind this door."

How he hated pathos.

"You must know. How much longer must I wait?" he said mournfully. "I am beaten, caged, shot... how much more does your Princess want from me?"

"Queen."

That first word. Even as the knives of the warding light cut the once-king of Evil, Ganondorf split a wide smile. Here was the crack to tease wider.

The muffled voice of the guard wavered, but commanded firmly, "Queen Zelda is worthy of your respect."

Ganondorf sneered. "Queen? Has she any heir?"

Silence. A pained silence. Interesting, Ganondorf thought. She is not perfect or infallible, despite how well she's made a system of my destruction.

"I apologize," he said with what for him passed as meekness. "Certainly she must be an effective sovereign."

"Effective enough to eliminate you."

A needle of panic scraped the back of his mind, under control, but dimly there, pressing, nagging for attention. So, he thought, I do not have all eternity to waste and she means to kill me again. He clenched down on his worst suspicions, and put the thought of being cast back into the hot earth out of his mind.

"I must speak to her, I beg of you. I am not ready! At least grant my final requests to her."

"You will be ready in a fortnight. Willing or not."

And there was the time-table, revealed by careless talk as predictably as the moon's rise. Ganondorf almost wanted to thank the guard for his cooperation. They always did cooperate, eventually: soldier or king. Hylian wit, he thought, hadn't improved in that wide near-thousand years.

With his execution looming in the near future, Ganondorf clenched his fist and leaned in agony deeper against the burning barrier. Before the end, he thought, this man and I will be the _best_ of friends.


	4. 3

"I have a final request. Please relay this to the Queen."

Ganondorf tossed a heavy wooden pin against the door. One curious thing, he noted, was that there was no metal in his room beyond the soft-tin mirror and a pewter basin. Perhaps they were concerned that he would find a weapon, he thought, but then again they should have known better: he needed none. Even so, the pin was oak-cut and heavy, and made a satisfying sound against the thick, reinforced wood.

He could hear the guard outside shift. It was a characteristic sound, now that he had trained his ears to it. Links of chain-mail scraping: muffled, but there. The tiny vibration of a pike meeting the floor, or a footstep just outside.

"Speak," permitted the guard.

Ganondorf tapped the door with the wooden pin, avoiding the hissing barrier. Without a face, these little sounds were the only expression he could offer the guard, and made a fitting mask. It was likely the man had not even seen him, and Ganondorf had long realized the unexpected fruit that charred, obliterated book of children's myths had borne to him.

Not a soul knew who he was.

Ergo, he could be anyone he so pleased.

"I have a cache," Ganondorf said, edging over to his slim window slit, measuring distance in that tiny slash of view with his thumb "Between the first and second curtain walls, underneath the aqueduct that now cuts them. I wish it returned, preferably to one of little prosperity that would profit from it."

Ganondorf spoke, of course, not of any purposeful cache of riches, but of a trap he had constructed long ago, before the second wall had been built. There was no better way to lure those who dissent, he knew, than with purposely spread whispers: promises of gems, gold, and baskets of shining glass rupees. The mechanisms or guards he had left in antiquity would be long-disarmed by time, but the hidden hatch surely remained. He had enchanted it in ancient times to appear only to ones who sought the treasure, and that spell surely still held.

It would have been a poor man-trap if it had been found by anything other than men.

The guard had been thinking for some short time when Ganondorf heard a reply on the other side of the door. "Who are you, prisoner, to keep your ill-gotten prizes in an area so tightly watched?"

"I am a king of thieves," said Ganondorf, "and that modest hole is only one of many. I simply want the Queen to find... a suitable recipient.. before I divulge the location of any others. What use is wealth to a dead man?"

"I see, thief. I will... tell her of your wishes."

And then he was gone; Ganondorf could hear the hard soles of his boots strike the hard granite slabs of the floor. Then, a noise like a vault opening and slamming shut. And suddenly, sounds below him: faintly vanishing down a spiral stair.

Ganondorf reclined on the abused bed, wrapped in the woolen blanket against the draft from the thin window. He smiled, and recounted in his mind the location of other things of value he surely had left behind, ones that Hylians had no reason to have discovered or disturbed.

While he only had a limited time to work, Ganondorf had confidence that petty greed worked faster than even he would have, had he been free.

—

"The cache has been found."

"And who received its contents?"

The guard paused. "A man named Kael. The son of Ulrich," he said. "He is of the castle guard."

"Very good," said Ganondorf, noting the guard had finally revealed his name. "And what does this Kael need of my patronage?"

"He is engaged, but his love's dowry is scant. He... must furnish her for the match to appear proper. And to pay the doctor for a sleeping draught."

Ganondorf scratched his pin down the door: slowly, emphatically, and he could not hide the grin in his words. "I believe I have some jewels hidden away that his woman would appreciate..."

—

The sun rose, and the sun set. It was precisely the right angle to piece his eyes, from that tiny pin of a window, when he woke. His tower was the easternmost one, if it contained a clear view of not only one of his hidden man-traps, but eight .With no candle of his own, his room was dark even in late afternoon: a sealed cavern with only a dim slash of indirect sun. There was nothing more to read, anyhow, so the lack of light was hardly a bother.

The sun rose and set, and as it set on the eighth day of his imprisonment the full moon glowed in the sky, sending ghostly white fingers into his cage. His breath fogging before him in the frigid room, seated on the bed, Ganondorf closed his eyes. How he hated this sort of magic, the sort that the Twinrova scoffed at yet the high priestess insisted he pursue. Of course, it was the gateway to darker arts: easily adapted to his own tastes. But this purer, more visceral application was simply not to his taste. Even if it was in his blood, it took several tries to reach the proper state of being where he could sense _them_.

The spirits, of course. Mortal souls, ancestors recoiled and fled before him, vanishing back beyond the veil. They could have done whatever they pleased, Ganondorf thought, for they were not why he was there. As he continued, only the spirit of the stone beneath him, of the mortar and wood and timbers, remained. Gently, like lifting a dragonfly's wing floating on a basin of water, he peeled _himself_away from his physical body. Color was muted as Ganondorf stepped away from himself, in the cold, silent realm that was the echo of Hyrule, of reality. Carefully, he adjusted his presence, his touch trembling with difficulty in control, and suddenly that abandoned dimension of spirits was replaced by the physical world. His sleeping body slumped before him. In the mirror, his form had no reflection: invisible and silent to any creature.

Ganondorf cracked a wretched grin. Any holy priestess would have had a fit, to see their accursed King upstage their duties. Hyrule Castle was not exactly the Spirit Temple but it served well enough. And more importantly, no magic that bound physical beings could do so here while he was insubstantial.

He was running out of treasures to give to Kael. He had to survey the castle in earnest to describe the locations of others in detail enough to find.

Like a ghost, he passed through the heavy door to see a tiny, fortified guardhouse. The guard outside his room stood at-attention, unblinking, with wide eyes that occasionally wicked from the opposite wall to his room, and to the locks and bars that braced it. The only sound, however, was that of his own breathing. Ganondorf could see the man sweat. He had nothing to gain from fraternizing with more fools. The power of one ill-advised man was quite enough for his purposes.

If only this other sentinel knew, he thought, who exactly he held behind that terrible door. Then perhaps he would defect and put as much distance between it and himself as possible. The trapdoor that led down the tower was more a hatch: solid steel, like a blasting-door that withstood all but meteors. He flashed through it with ease. As Ganondorf walked, a spectre, down the stairs, he saw the guard changing already. Yes, he thought— his _friend _stood at attention only in the hour of dawn. Even if he fled or somehow perished, the guard could always be replaced.

His boots made no sound, obviously, on the cold marble floors. He could see the ancient stone was worn, pitted from use and the wear of water. Curiously, he remembered more luxuries. For all of Hyrule's mocking prosperity, walls were cavernously bare, and the draft sour as it puffed down the hall: over the rushes and straw scattered to catch debris. He'd used this castle once, and never cared for its sprawling rooms save as a hazard and a labyrinth, or a twisting barracks for his army of darkness. Maids hurried up and down the corridors rarely, in and out of various bedrooms and second-level parlors. A miserable serving boy swept the refuse and the rushes out of the corners and away.

At every corner, steel-clad soldiers stood warningly at attention. Ganondorf finally spied sunlight from something other than an arrow slit: a locked shutter-door. He reached out, the phantom of his hand restored in this unreal form, and nearly forgot that there were no latches to trouble him. He simply stepped through the wooden slatted hatch. He remembered it had once been glass. He also remembered it had once been shattered, by himself, and this was an old balcony indeed if he had been gone for very long.

Ganondorf's eyes instantly flicked from rampart to rampart, forgetting his original purpose and noting the expansion, and the patrol of soldiers atop the thick, siege-proof curtain walls. They marched below, like silver beetles in ranks and pairs. No morning sun bothered these ethereal eyes; he could see archers with hair-string bows, pikemen with the glare winking upon their silver spearheads, and a veritable army of pages and messengers hurrying along the walls with news. A sharper realization yet was the regularity of their movements. However mighty the garrison had become, it was not one swollen in the midst of war. Ganondorf pitied the poor neighbor with ambitions of grandeur that, upon declaration of invasion, would come to find such a terrifying muster of military might Hyrule's _routine_.

It took a moment for him to realize he had succinctly described himself.

Leaving the balcony, Ganondorf found that wandering the halls like a lost squire no longer satisfied him, and while he was out he had ought to investigate something more worthwhile than a bribe. Holding his breath (more on ceremony than anything; his lungs were back in the tower high above), he descended through the stone floor. Power of flight once in his grasp aside, delving through solid ground had never been to his tastes. However distant, he remembered an incident in his youth when he had nearly buried himself beneath a horse's length of desert sand. Even so, he passed down into a great hall. There was no feast or banquet tonight, however; it was taken up with a giant cauldron and maids with cloths tied about their abused noses. Ganondorf ignored those there who were making tallow candles, and instead swept up the far steps, took two right hand turns, and stopped before a great pair of carved oak doors.

Someone had an audience with the Queen.

Masked in that distraction, he did his best to shield his presence and stepped past the threshold. The only room he recognized as the same: the same carpet, the same glass, the same throne and the same windows to the courtyard, the throne room was still the same as ever. Even when he'd had it under his control, he hardly touched it. He preferred a somewhat _higher_seat of power, upon the towers above.

The Queen stationed herself upon this lesser throne. His blood boiled where his true body sat, and his phantom shape seethed, forgetting its form and writhing like a mass of serpents. So bold, she sat there ramrod-straight, stern gaze unflinching as she heard the story of two quarreling merchants. One had somehow offended the other, and both had come to the Queen for judgement over the matter... Ganondorf could not care less. The sight of his many-times bane, ancient enemy, hated enemy, dwarfed everything in his mind. He had no doubt it was she who had encased him in a trap of fire, severed his hand and taken away what the Gods had rightfully given to him.

The damnable

princess

Zelda.

Not this particular one, however, but they were all the same in the end, anyway. All of them avatars of his downfall, the same woman in many hateful iterations. Only she was not blessed with a strong soul, he supposed, for where his resurrection was often perfect, a re-making that left him right as he'd left off, hers left her vulnerable: years of childhood to be endured, one identity passed down a bloodline that _so many times_ Ganondorf had been _sure _he'd broken.

He'd never succeeded. Her very birth taunted him. Somehow, no matter how secure his victory, no matter how complete his domination, she always managed to be born, to exist, to stand forth despite him. Yes, many times he had killed her and claimed victory, yet she always returned.

Only faintly did he acknowledge that she must have regarded him in much the same way.

Ganondorf's gaze burned over her, etching the face of his enemy into the back of his skull. This one was indeterminate, though they all blended together after a while. She must have been fairly young, but then much of the world was young to him, and she was not one of those innocent things that was. Her face was somewhat starker, more knife-edged than he remembered, though not plainer. He did not know what the common features of her wretched nobility were, or the stock of her breeding, but she was somewhat more robust than he remembered; even through the gown of her station, he could see the iron of strong wrists and the set of sturdy shoulders. Obviously, he remarked with scorn: she had been the bowman to pacify him, for no other magician could have produced arrows that were somehow so repulsive to him. At the most shallow glance, he noted the bright golden hair of the royal family seemed to have dirtied and diluted: to what reminded him of dry autumn leaves.

There was only so much the eyes could perceive. Like a cloud of dark smoke, he spread and fanned his senses out, searching. To his anger, he could sense no touch of the Gods upon her. Perhaps she had hidden it. He pushed harder and discovered that yes, she was as much a magician as he was, yet he was forced to give her a wide berth for the power that paralyzed his limbs and body dwelt within her without need of arrows or sword. Yet, that drove him down, his mind feeling blindly around the castle, down past the dungeons, down under the earth...

he brushed the familiar feel of Power (protest, resignation) far below the castle. His anger exploded into triumph. There! He had found it! She could not hide it from him, he was _destined_ for it, it was _his, _and no Zelda would keep it from him for long—

He looked up to grin at her, and found they had locked eyes. How long she had been staring at him, he didn't know, but her expression was just as much heavy granite as the merchants had elicited. There was warning there, anger, but a quality that struck him far harder and banished him back into his body faster than he could stop himself.

She had looked as if she had not been able to decide whether to strike a fly or not. Equal parts irritated, exhausted, and unamused: she had been _bored_. Utterly unafraid, even. Ganondorf was not sure why this frightened him.

And it did.

Back on his bed, Ganondorf felt a shrieking crick in his back, and his crippled arm throbbed painfully. His face was bloodless. At least the bed was soft. He laid back on it, rubbing his temples and scolding his heartbeat for betraying him. It was difficult to accept that he, King of Evil, was afraid.

And yet, without that security, without the Power to fight away the shades of _this could be the end_ and _your time is short_, fear ruled him. Ganondorf did not like it. But he was so deeply lacking in control of his situation there was little to do now but think of that lion-eyed Zelda and feel like a swine shut in before the slaughter. Kael was out, Ganondorf suspected, retrieving his latest artifact of value and Ganondorf took the moment to resent that his fate was clasped in the greedy fingers of this _foolish stranger._

He had to reclaim it. He had to reclaim Power, he thought, before he went mad, and before he was sent to some more permanent execution ground. Before those hopeless, stupid, _mortal_parts of him became too loud to silence with security. He recalled a vow he'd made centuries ago, reveling at how lost Hyrule's nobility would be once the privilege and power of their stations were stripped from them. At the time he'd meant to be the scourge, yet here he was: deposed. It felt deeply wrong to him. As wrong as the sky being down and the earth being up. As hideous as mothers eating their young, clawing at the pit of his stomach like a savage beast fallen ill.

I am power, he thought. I am might. I am death and the demise of my enemies. I conquer all.

And yet it all came together. A trap meant to dispose of him permanently. A pre-emptive crippling, such that if he managed to escape he could be easily collected. Hyrule more than ready for his return. A cage prepared long before he'd ever escaped the fiery pit of the earth. A boredom, a frustration with his presence...

Ganondorf clenched his eyes against the conclusion.

He could not be a nuisance.

Or damage to be contained, or controlled.

Trivial. It turned his stomach. He barely noticed the routine, cheerless serving of food that was conjured up on timetable, but reached to the rickety side table anyway for the plate when his innards tied hungry knots in protest. Halfway through a mouthful of dry bread, Ganondorf noticed a tiny note, written on a napkin in charcoal. The handwriting was impeccable, though the author had smudged as the message had been folded and several lines of sooty prints crossed the imperfect embroidered edging as dirty fingers had stretched it flat to write upon. There were no whorls of a bare-handed touch, and from their delicate size Ganondorf could clearly imagine the white-gloved grasp of the Queen.

_There is nothing to see._

Angrily, he dipped a thick finger into the grey ash that had once been a wooden bookshelf, and with wobbling, off-handed, childish print, smeared his reply over her words.

_THERE WILL BE._

—

Eventually, his fortnight came to an end and The Day came. At dawn, Ganondorf heard the first scrape upon his iron key was fitted into his locks. A rasping click released the first bolt. A second lock was undone. The third and final steel bar, a deadbolt as thick as a man's waist, scraped aside. For the first time, Ganondorf felt the outside air flood into his cold and suffocating room. Closing his eyes, he took the moment to listen.

"He's as big as a horse."

"Shush. I know this prisoner. He will want to speak to me. He said that he would reveal the location of his greatest treasure of all to me tonight, as his final will before execution. As you know, he has been generous."

Rough hands began pulling his wounded arm behind his back, as if to tie it out of the way. Ganondorf opened his eyes. The grin that split his face shone in the dark, hungrier than a winter wolf's.

"This is my will: to see you writhe in the wealth of your suffering."


	5. 4

Not ten minutes later, the Queen Zelda of Hyrule burst through the door, eyes sharp as daggers. "I instructed you to wait," she said quite evenly, in a tone that made the only remaining guardsman flinch. "Tell me your name and rank and your explanation for this."

"Kael, son of Ulrich. I'm sorry, Your Majesty. I had spoken to the prisoner, and I thought he would be asleep, and that I could prepare him for you. He... he was almost too much for us."

The Queen frowned deeply at him. The accompanying guards groaned on the floor, some struggling upright to check on their fallen brethren. All of them breathed. "You are lucky no one was lost," she scolded. "This is a dangerous man. I would not have kept him here in secrecy if he was not."

She stared at the motionless form of Ganondorf, the anonymous prisoner and only ward of the high eastern tower. "I am frankly amazed you managed to subdue him."

"He was savage, my Queen." said the man named Kael. "Only luck saved us. I pierced his lung, but he managed just as well without it for some time. Before he fell, he..."

Kael slumped to the ground. He had been pressing a wad of bedsheet to his arm. A dull whimper caught within his throat, gurgling and guttural, as his wound was revealed to the Queen, unable to keep composure for any longer. Streaks of bloody fingerprints clawed at his right elbow, and the bone was bent in an unnatural way. The wreckage of his chain shirt dug into raw flesh, shorn links scattered among shattered bone. His gauntlet, and a fair portion of his limb was torn off, twisted like a bundle of sticks. The liberated appendage sat on the floor, dead, only a few feet away. Kael was pale as the blood gushed.

"He said we ought to match."

Then he passed into shock. Healers rushed into the room, only a staircase behind Queen Zelda. Immediately they saw to the maimed Kael and to his stunned unit.

Zelda stood over the massive, gasping form of Ganondorf. Breathless, the man weakly gulped for air, but could not glean any with the hole in his chest. He tried to speak, a frenzy of terror staining his face, but his inarticulate pleas had no voice. the Queen watched with an apologetic expression as the man passed away in agonizing silence. She stood vigil the entire time as life left him. A gust whistled into the tower room, rustling her white skirts as she knelt down to close his eyes, which had already begun to frost over in the cold.

"Bring this one to the infirmary. Cover him with a shroud, and put him in the cold-room with any other dead to be kept for burial. Do nothing with him until I so command," she instructed, face like white marble. "And see that Kael, as soon as he is well, receives an audience with me at the first possible convenience."

-

Kael awoke to the sight of a stone ceiling and the sound of tapping footsteps to his left. His eyes slid to his bedside to find only a bleached sheet strung up as a screen between him and the offending pair of shoes. The cast shadow of a matron could be seen beyond, and vanished as she stepped out of what must have been a window's light.

He reached to pull the curtain back, only to forget that he was short a few fingers. Sighing, his head hit the pillow again. The entire bed creaked.

"I am not sure how your arm could be infected in so short a time," said the matron aloud. "Then again, prisoners are often filthy. Welcome back to the land of the living, dear."

Kael decided he absolutely hated infirmaries. "I don't need any welcome," he grumbled. "I need something to eat."

"You're talkative for someone who was bled like a market pig. I suppose you kept all your manners in that hand, and they all fell out when you dropped it," said the flippant matron. "Just a moment. I'll fetch your supper."

"You're too bold. I was fond of that hand, and you mock me."

The matron swept the curtain aside, flooding Kael's bed with afternoon sun. He flinched, squinting. The rays from the barred window almost felt to sear his skin.

"Come now, you can stand a little sunshine," she said, pushing a bowl of soup into Kael's lap. "And I've treated boys much worse than you. A doctor certainly doesn't tiptoe around injuries, you know. You must accept the reality as soon as it is possible for you to do so."

Kael blinked. "I was not aware that... we... had female doctors."

"We most certainly do, in my family for two generations," said the doctor. "And I believe I have treated you before, for sleeplessness; should I sew up your memory, too? I was certain your hand was enough."

"It is good that you are a doctor. Now leave me be," Kael demanded. "I'm in no mood for your games."

He picked up the spoon awkwardly, and turned it over in his good hand. His fingers did not seem to be able to decide how to grasp it. He frowned as he dipped it into the soup, and awkwardly slurped up the stew. The potato in it was too hot, and it caused his touch to shake as he flinched, smearing a bit on his left cheek.

"You'll have to live with that hand. Eventually you will gain finer control of it," said the doctor. "And I will leave you now. It is difficult to keep one's bedside manner when the one in bed has suddenly become insufferable."

She swept out of the room, leaving the sun beaming into Kael's eyes. He could hear the heavy soles of her shoes tap down the hallway until she vanished into the sprawling passages of the castle.

"That is not the way to treat the one who killed the King of Darkness," he grumbled, and took another shaking taste of broth. He closed his eyes and sighed.

"Amazing. Prisoners are served better."

Kael often slept after that, whenever anyone happened into the room. Encounters like the one previous were undesirable, and led to questions, and the last thing he wanted to do was to answer questions about what happened that early morning in the tower, or worse.

He asked after his unit, once, when a more reasonable nurse made the rounds. He saw none of them in the infirmary with him, after all. The answer was only ever a shrug. He once tried to inquire about the fate of the prisoner he slew in the tower. Others told him he was executed, like all the rest. None could offer him a description. It was clear that prisoner, the only ward of the highest tower, had already been scoured from memory: a no-name in an unmarked grave.

Kael could have split a rare smile at that, but he had to keep up appearances. That was just as it should have been. He would have liked a little more ceremony, or perhaps some reward. Then again, that was the way it always was: good deeds never really resulted in prosperity. Only when they brought prosperity to others were they celebrated, like a gift. And then the recipient was the world at large, regardless of if they deserved it or not. Generosity and kindness were thankless endeavors, really.

He really could not blame the rest of the castle for not wanting to upset the status quo.

Unfortunately, the status quo _was_ upsetting. Or at least the girl weeping at his bedside was.

"Oh, Kael... please wake up," she sobbed, clasping his limp hand in her own. With closed eyes, Kael could feel her soft fingers. The nails were rough and jagged. She was working hard, he supposed. It was difficult to even his breathing in the face of the fit she was throwing over him, but he managed all the same.

"Oh Goddesses, what do you want? I'll do anything. I don't care if Kael lost his hand... I just want him back. We were going to be married, you had found so many wonderful things for me... and... oh..."

It was curious, he thought, how she implored the heavens to grant her wish, when her concerns were much more likely to be realized if she addressed the doctor instead. He supposed she must have been beautiful; if this was any indication, he certainly hadn't accepted engagement with her for her sense of practicality or reason.

"My love, they tell me that you sometimes wake and speak, but never have you done so when I have visited." She stroked his hand now. Kael contemplated sleeping in earnest to avoid her. "What affliction troubles you, steals you from me? What have I done wrong to you?"

Her touch traveled up, over the rough linens, to grasp his face, which he kept slack. The purpose of this eluded him until the light press of lips to his silenced his thoughts. He could feel her smear clammy tears over his face; her embrace, to her, was intimate. Kael did not care for it. Faintly, he was aware of a dull buzzing in the back of his mind: like a muffled chorus. It whispered of guilt and sunk his stomach in a way that made him fear he had gone pear-shaped in the head.

Faintly, not out of charity or affection, he returned the embrace. With no enthusiasm: only in the way a sleep-talker or incoherent would. It was enough for the poor girl, and she returned with enthusiasm. Kael was less than pleased, and sat there with mouth twitching like a fish. When she finally broke away and let him breathe again, it took all of his restraint not to grimace in disgust. There, he thought. You received a greater kindness than you deserve. Be content with your dying betrothed. Now go away and leave him alone.

"I love you, Kael. Come back to me soon."

Finally, _finally_, he heard her turn around and open the door to leave. Morbid curiosity caused him to crack open an eye to look upon her. He discovered she was young, likely one of the lowest of the maids.

The door slammed shut. "There," he muttered. "I gave a gift to a pathetic girl I shan't see again. What is my reward, gods?"

The heavens remained silent as ever.

He turned over in bed, quietly listening to the subtle _click-click_ of the wound timer-clock.

—

The castle only became colder as he descended. Unlike the tower's tightly wound ascent, the way down into the deep basements and vaults of the castle was scattered and sporadic. Short staircases, on opposite sides of the castle's bounds, cleared from level to level. Kael supposed that in a siege, supplies and garrisons would be pulled down into these levels, and if anything breached the walls or tunneled in, they would have to clear the entire floor to descend even only one level deeper: springing countless traps or ambushes.

That strategy was entirely useless when danger came from inside the castle itself.

Guards paid him no heed as he, their peer marched past them. Even with his bad arm in a sling, they merely nodded him onward.

Kael passed the larder, and sneered at the enormous stockpile of food. Curiously, the guards outside were similarly jealous of the horde.

Kael passed storage, past relics that must have been newer than most anyone guarding them guessed; all of them valueless in his eyes.

Kael passed the prison, where he supposed more regular criminals were kept. They pleaded for mercy, but found none in him.

Kael passed a treasury, full of gold and measured wealth. It interested him little.

Finally, Kael came to a door. It was a most unassuming door: not bolted or barred, but dusty. Fingerprints smeared its age, snapshots of inept fumbling with the iron latch. Kael opened it to reveal a thin, black shaft cut down into the earth. If he did not know better, he would have assumed it to be a well. He grasped the thick rope that delved into its depths with his good hand and pulled. He could feel something much heavier than a pail on the other end of the pulley. Catching the loose end of the rope under his boot, he slowly and laboriously pulled a heavy wooden pallet up from what looked like an abyssal depth. Bracing with his good arm, he kicked the length of rope onto the hoist, and then boarded it himself. Then, he carefully let the rope slip through his grasp. It rubbed the palm of Kael's leather glove raw as he slowly descended down into the darkness.

It took only a few minutes to suddenly feel a _bump_ under the pallet as it struck solid ground. But to Kael, it could have been an age. He walked in the direction he knew was correct. After three steps, he met a wall.

He destroyed it.

Screaming fire and swords met him in this room: a full garrison of enchanted sentries, beamos and armos. Angrily, he released the pressure in his body, three days holding back and sleeping instead of crushing his irritations once and for all. A great destructive force had never been far away for him: merely a bottle to be uncorked and ruin let spill forth. Nothing remained of the guardians but gravel.

Another wall cut his path. It met the same fate as the first.

And there he saw it, quietly glowing, filling the tiny vault with dull, yellow light. A gnarled, mummified hand stuck straight up on a simple stone slab, sealed within a magic circle. Once he was whole, any protective curse would be a mere trifle. He set foot into the bounds of the spell and could immediately feel his limbs slow, his movement begin to tense up. He forced on anyway. Step after step, foot after foot, he approached the dark hand and the divine power it held. However, to his irritation, he could feel the protective spell working to freeze him to the spot. He could not reach the prize...

Or rather, Kael, small and Hylian could not reach the prize. Ganondorf with great relief dropped the false shape and took a deep breath. The top of his head nearly brushed the low ceiling. He stretched out with his great height, even encumbered by the curse, and plucked the prize from where it sat. Body as heavy as lead, he roughly fixed the ancient, blackened hand against his vacant arm and commanded what was his own flesh and blood to _join._

And it did, forming a sickly, tenuous seam. Greedily, Ganondorf grasped out to Power, imprisoned, and tore it free: hoarding it in his flesh, hoisting it high in his spirit like a great flag of victory. The stone basement began to shake with the exaltation of his demands, escaping that deep, internal place that was the wellspring of his own magic, and leaking out into the waking world in pulsing, dark waves.

You are mine. You serve _me._

And yet, to his horror, there were two faint, terrible answers.

A yes to the first. A no to the second.

Then it was over. It was as if something had blown out a candle in his heart, and the roiling sun-heat that the heavenly power emitted snuffed away without smoke. There was no ash. Ganondorf could not detect where it could possibly had gone. If he knew less about the omnipresence of said Power, he would have supposed it had ceased to exist. Not even the dull murmur in his blood, the quiet resistance it made when it was the least pleased to do his bidding, was left. In the subterranean chamber, it was utterly black. His hands balled into angry fists, but the right split and cracked unpleasantly. Invisible without light, Ganondorf could only feel it begin to crumble to dust. First the ancient skin flaked, then the flesh dried and fell away like particles of sand. Nails shivered and vanished, and soon even bone thinned like an ancient eggshell, and eventually wore away.

Leaving him as he was before, maimed. Mortal. A cripple.

A light flickered close behind him, casting his shadow upon the far wall. In the haze, Ganondorf's spinning mind fell upon the magic circle etched upon the floor. It was not his familiar sort of art; it was a snare meant for long, long waiting, the sort he never had patience for. The characters the spell had been encoded in were foreign, ancient Hylian from truly elder days. He could recognize a few words, however. In particular, a sympathetic allusion to _shackles_.

"To what, then, am I bound?" Ganondorf asked of the one that cast the light behind him. He knew very well who it was, and he knew intimately what withering sun and heat scalded the back of his neck. "This vault? The ground? The depths of the earth itself? What now, princess, is to be my prison?"

He could hear the sound of a linen bowstring pull taut.

"Shall I die here, and revive here, bound in cold earth? When fire did not suffice?" he paused. "It was a clever system, Princess. But all things break."

The tight grip of his fist, the cut of his nails, began to draw blood.

"I see to that."

Cloth whirled as he spun to face her, strike stabbing wildly into _air_, air that she would have occupied if she'd delayed even a heartbeat longer. For all that the motion of her dodge was fluid, she misfired, the arrow striking the far corner of the vault and at once casting them into a stark instant of black shadows and white glare. Sparks lingered, spots dancing in their eyes as Ganondorf advanced, sweeping with his great reach. In soldier's breeches, Zelda scrambled out of the way and backward, pulling a second arrow. This one Ganondorf reflected, batting it aside in flight with an assault of fire. Zelda bit her lip and reached for a third shot, but found her footing had brought her against the wall. The shining afterglow of her arrows of light was fading fast, and in the dark she seemed to shrink, diminished. A great hand pinned her, the palm covering her whole shoulder and wrenching it against the damp stone. It released, and began to snake up towards her neck...

and froze. Breathing hard, hair in ruin, face pale and slick with sweat, Zelda's mouth hardened. She summoned a candle, a trifle of sorcery. Her eyes grew steely and cold, and she gestured at the frozen Ganondorf. Against his will, shaking, with paralyzed voice and terrified gaze, he bent one knee. He resisted, of course, but in the end he could not force away the compulsion, and dropped to the floor.

"No, Lord of Darkness. That is not how you are bound."

He struggled to look up at her. A mandate, as chill as death, forced his head down.

"My ancestors have tried each of those, to no success. How could I put you, the greatest ancestral threat to my people, in cages you have already escaped? Not even the ancient tower, the masterwork of generations of spell-weaving and jail-craft, proved effective as even a temporary measure for your containment."

A tiny voice needled him in the soft parts of his brain, itching as he sat there. It was the sort of voice Ganondorf hated. The sort that prickled and questioned and poked and pried until, like a scab lifted, a bleeding, tender flesh was exposed. It scratched, nails upon the back of his brain: this is wrong. This is not how _she_ ever was. You did something, perhaps you have done it long in the past, but whatever the circumstance it is _your fault._ What, Gerudo King, did you do? What did you do to her person, to produce... _this?_

Everything, he realized.

"It's clear I can scarcely leave you to your own devices for even a few days. It's to my line you are bound, by my will and authority as Queen ."

"I will escape. And you will perish."

To that, she smiled. For all her queenly fortitude, she still shook like a reed, but she smiled all the same. And as he stared into her eyes, the needling dread confirmed it, shrieked it, clawed it in despair and madness that to her he was nothing more than _unruly_.

"It is true that you have burst forth from every prison ever conceived to hold you. It is true that you have escaped the wrath of ages, the heavens, and even consumption by the fires of death itself." She paused to unstring her bow, a startlingly smooth motion for a recurve that must have been fifty pounds of force. "But the one thing you have never escaped, and will never escape, is me."


	6. 5

To Ganondorf's irritation, the first thing he had to endure of his servitude was a feast. He had initially protested, violently, but he could not stop the curse from taking hold of his limbs and snapping them to his sides, clenching and choking his throat until he no longer could breathe if he spoke out against the Queen. _Behave_, she had commanded, as if scolding an unruly child. Ganondorf was surprised that the command was even effective, that he knew much of 'behaving' as she meant it at all. For before the feast, she had thoroughly tested the bounds of his bindings.

He shuddered involuntarily. Though he was tied to her will, she was unable to force upon him a task he did not know how to accomplish. He merely stood idle at demands such as, 'fetch me the moon,' or 'dance for me the Ordonian half-step.' Demands for information needn't have been truthful, either, unless she explicitly requested it of him. Commands he did not agree with ('stick your finger in your ear,') he could resist, in a limited fashion, but not for long. There was nothing that bound his inaction, nor prohibited him from acting beyond the orders given to him, and if she ordered against something it would become taboo for only a limited time, only as long as her conviction for the order held.

Ganondorf felt the minutes slip by, waiting for her flippant demand for child's obedience to pass and his ability to act to be restored. King of Evil once as he was, the pit of his stomach slithered with dread as she stared at him impassively and literally forbade him free will.

Zelda had dressed him in white armor for the occasion. A full helm masked his face, and completely sealed in silver steel there was nothing of his identity presented forth to the crowd in the great hall. He was not permitted to sit, but stood silently, angrily, as the Queen to his side and the high table of nobility ate. None of them were aware that at their back stood not only their ancestral bane, but also a man bound by magics so unspeakable and unethical that they hadn't seen use, even at his own hands, in ages of the earth. Not since the Sheikah were banished and the remainder bound to eternal servitude. Not since his own people rebelled and had to be... subdued. Not since he had given that duty to Twinrova. His breath was sour, trapped within the helm. For the first time in several hundred years, he thought of Nabooru. He instead turned his attentions to the crowd.

It was a cacophony of sound; the feast was such a squeezed collection of bodies that he could feel their combined heat assault him through his armor. Ganondorf had been there as the tables had been laid out, ordered to stand and wait. He had watched as what must have been the entirety of the Castle Town crowd in. The nobility were fortunate enough to be first, of course, but after they had arrived with appropriate fashion and dignity the common-folk arrived bearing neither. They came, a horde of pale, freckled skin and chattering voices. In baskets, in hands, and in sacks they brought their pewter plates and goblets, their trenchers, knives, and napkins.

The polite conversation at the high table could barely be heard over their riotous laughter, the babbling of their children, and the barking of their dogs. There was no way to listen closely, not with the echos ringing in his muffled ears, so Ganondorf instead chose to observe. He could feel fire seething in his skin, sulfur bubbling in his veins, demanding he act, do _something_, but for the moment he had to watch. And wait.

More than a few military men sat at the high table, more than in his memory. Though that was dim; he'd executed his fair share of noble families in his brief periods of victory, and it was only natural that new ones would spring up from whatever scraps of wealth and merit were left. To his surprise, there was one military _woman_, sitting at the far end, speaking to no one. A representative of the Gorons excitedly chewed on a bar of brass somewhere to the left: metals being a great delicacy to him where normal food was nothing. There was nothing of the Zora. Ganondorf wondered if the last time he ruled from this castle he truly had frozen them all to death. His stomach snarled and his attention turned to the food served. If he had not known better, he would have thought that Zelda was mocking him, putting on this display of wealth with full knowledge of his hatred of Hylian grandeur, denying him even a taste. But she did not smile; there was no joy in her expression as she had given her word to him hours before. His comfort was an insignificant point next to the safety and security of her people.

It occurred to him that it was really beyond reason to expect mercy, kindness, ethics, civility, or any sort of virtue in his position. Even if her intentions did not extend to outright torture, without any of the previous blessings he could expect cruelty in their stead. It rather felt like the world he had created in his rule of Hyrule had gone on without him. In this way, he supposed, his influence was eternal. Despite the monument in the castle courtyard. Despite the scouring of his name and memory from every tale and song.

Ganondorf did not like this victory as much as he expected he would have.

The smell of food assaulted him again as more was brought out. Curious, he thought, that the fare had been modest for the duration of the event. All of it made use of staples: peas, breads, pies, and minimal use of perishables. The meat was smoked. The vegetables were preserved. Ganondorf deduced that despite the bright sunshine he had endured in the infirmary, it truly was _deep_ in winter. As the crowd was temporarily placated with food, the Queen Zelda stood and called the hall to attention.

She spoke over the dull murmur. "While we feast here tonight, we make merry. However, there is a more somber purpose to our gathering."

If the crowd was any more somber, Ganondorf could not tell.

"We drink tonight in honor of one Kael, of my personal guard and elite of the Hylian Royal Army, who perished in the wake of duty: warden to a prisoner that only the strongest of soldiers could subdue. May it always be close in memory the sacrifice and nobility of our own in preserving peace and order in not only this castle, but in our lands beyond."

So the illusion must have worn off, and the guard's body must have regained its own form, thought Ganondorf. The dead, greedy man's life was a dull one, he bitterly admitted, and he regretted ever switching places with the corpse. He supposed that Zelda must have replaced the body in the infirmary bed, and Kael had 'died' of infection or wounds after his own act had finished.

"And yet, there is one small news of blessing," Zelda continued. "In honor of an ancient pact, a great warrior from across the desert has journeyed here to enter my service. Beholden to me, he will take the honored Kael's place at my side as one of my personal guard. May Kael rest soundly in the heavens with the knowledge that his duties will have so... noble... a successor."

That was when they began to stare. Ganondorf could not discern what was whispered, but by placing his mind at the far end of the hall instead of where he stood, Ganondorf could guess that they wondered at what to them would be a _giant_ by the Queen's side. For the first time that night in the cavernous hall, it was truly quiet.

Zelda raised her small glass cup. "To Kael, who rests with the Goddesses. To Ganondorf, a champion who stands at my side."

And they _cheered_. Ganondorf stared at them; they were _glad_. Voice stuck in his throat. Are you all _mad?_ What are you _thinking?_ He wanted to yell at them, wave his arms, do something... he fidgeted where he stood; the command to stay put had long worn off, but what was he to do? Stand atop a table and implore them to not exalt his name? That did not agree with him; he was never able to force any people to do such a thing despite how ardently in his rule he demanded it. He stared at Zelda as she too sat in her seat and drank to his name.

"What are you doing?" he snarled at her. "What are you trying to accomplish?"

But the hall was filled with noise once more, and his words traveled only inches from his face before they were swallowed up, like attempting to penetrate thick fog. Zelda did not look at him, but sat as still and poised as an icicle. Vaguely, Ganondorf caught an accidental glimpse of the inside of her cup and noted that where all others had toasted him with spirits, she had taken only water.

Perhaps it was merciful that not long after her statement, she retired to bed. As the guard at her side, Ganondorf was dragged along, feet both hesitant and all-too-willing to flee the hall after her. He tried again. "You are a fool. You make them praise the one who will slay their queen."

"Oh, enough," she frowned, and Ganondorf felt his tongue become slightly heavier. "You are not breaking free, so it is moot that you may as well resign yourself to your fate. There will be no slaying of anyone: not me, not you, not any of my people."

Ganondorf, within the helm, made a sound that could only have been considered feral. "Others have dismissed me to their peril, princess."

"And you are a nuisance I will have to bear for the rest of my days. I hope you are pleased with yourself; we have come to an impasse that is equally unpleasant for both of us. My child will be your warden, and his children will have to endure you as well."

"You have no children," Ganondorf snarled, and in rage made a mad assertion, grasping furiously at a few scattered words he recalled had been said to him: Kael's admission-by-omission. "And I doubt you will bear one in any length of time."

She fixed him in a furious stare, but the spark was out in an instant, and her gaze became heavy where it had been sharp. She huffed a sigh of cold disappointment. "I really don't have the patience for this. Please be off to bed, and resume duty in the morning."

Ganondorf's hand shot out like a python, striking at her neck. It was not faster than her eyes, however, and the man found himself pinned to the spot, shaking in cold sweat. He had never been entirely familiar with Sheikah methods and had once simply used raw force to strip away the will of followers... this way, a hijacking of will, he concluded was even more terrible.

"I do not want to order you, Ganondorf. I have had my fill of that today. Your bindings don't sit well with me, but if they are what keeps my people safe, you leave me no choice. I will do what I must."

Ganondorf felt his lungs constrict without him, but noted the confession came despite her granite demeanor and despite all possible wisdom of said grandmothers. From that information, a single conclusion about the character of this Princess Zelda blossomed so quickly it almost left Ganondorf reeling in the wake of his own understanding.

And he smiled, turned on his heel, and willingly went to the barracks. That was one secret to foiling the curse, he discovered at that moment. She could not force or punish him if he followed a command willingly. He was sure he could twist that to his advantage in some way later.

The squires were scarcely courageous enough to exhume him from the mountain of metal that sealed him in. He barely fit in Kael's old bunk, and the men attempted to converse with him. But after all was done, Ganondorf closed his eyes. He could hear the dull roar of the feast below, but it did not drown out the tiniest sound he held in his mind. He clawed over her words, each syllable picked apart; he had been sure he had heard it, and he held the memory of that damning _waver_ in her voice.

The traps had been set long ago and this Zelda had inherited them, but had not inherited a drop of conviction from her ancestors. Ganondorf concluded that she was weak, and the will that bound him would eventually break.

She had shut him in a very impressive prison, to be sure. But all Ganondorf had to do was to find the one loose brick.

Ganondorf chewed the piece of salt pork, and washed it down with a gulp from his waterskin. The drink was still warm; boiled clean sometime before dawn and given to him nearly at daybreak when he'd been roused. He rubbed his eyes; for all that in the distant, forgotten past he had once been a general, he was not a military man. Or at least not the sort that these Hylians thought they were.

Thankfully, he did not have to perform drills with the regular army that stretched before him.

"They must not have any of this where you're from," the King General said next to him, and Ganondorf could nearly feel the waves of pride radiating off the man, like heat from a candle.

"We are more informal," Ganondorf ceded, the barest hint of a scowl marring his mask of neutrality. He had taken no orders when he woke, but had instead received a request from the Queen that he oversee the morning's routine in order to acclimate himself. Really, he needed no order. He would obey, for this.

Ganondorf's scowl flickered into a faint smirk. Here, he thought, look at my army. Evaluate my weaknesses. I am Zelda, so _wise_ and I will _show_ you the extent of my hubris!

But that troubled him because the caricature hardly fit and after more deaths than he could count he had long since learned never to underestimate Zelda's actions. He scoured the training field, searching for some kind of hidden meaning. Did she mean to bully him? To show him the extent of her might? That was what he would have meant by such a message, and _he_ couldn't fathom any alternate intention.

The King General laughed beside him and slapped him on the back. "Ah, we do not put up with nonsense here. I think you'll find we have a little more than a militia, or whatever you are used to in your foreign lands."

Perhaps she meant to irritate him into submission.

"Our lands are harsh, and we do not have the luxury of regularity," replied Ganondorf. "We have been many things in our time: soldiers, farmers, hunters, and thieves. As the land changes, we must always adapt."

The King General looked up at the overcast winter sky, and to Ganondorf's surprise, he saw him ghost a frown. "Indeed."

The two men stood there awhile, looking out at what was only a fraction of Hyrule's military might. They were barely men, Ganondorf thought. Perhaps the _right_ age... he scanned the rows of faces, holding a particular image in his mind.

"What, do you estimate, is the number of your full muster?" Ganondorf asked, gaze falling upon the last row of young men and women, finding nothing.

"Pardon?"

"The full strength of your force," Ganondorf reiterated, "when all your able-bodied swell your numbers."

The Hylian king paused for a moment. "Bolstered with local footman, all mercenaries and all honorable allies of the lesser races...I would estimate ten thousand men and women. Not including dogs."

Ganondorf stared, closed his mouth, and bit his lip. "Very good," he admitted.

"Isn't it?" said the King General. "I estimate a few hundred they withhold from me in the provinces, that would bring my number up. But we do not rely on militia, as I said. Surely I must have only half of mine garrisoned at the moment. Many of mine are professional soldiers, and return to their homes to harvest on contract to return to me when I call."

"Cavalry?"

"Every horse in the kingdom is mine to command. I'd say two thousand of my number at the most."

"Well-outfitted?"

"To the best of my capability."

That answer meant nothing, but Ganondorf did not press the matter. "What do you... commonly... assemble this army for?"

"Assemble? Not much these days. Mostly to protect our borders; there is scarcely anything more than savage lands surrounding us now. Labrynna by the sea's Ordon country now, which too is mine. Holodrum past the badlands simply has nothing to defend; only Gorons live there." He paused. "I beg your pardon, considering there seems to be far less savagery in the desert than I was aware of, if its peoples now honor ancient alliances."

"I am surprised you do so little with your great force, Hyrulian king," Ganondorf commented. "You may have grown in might, but you have diminished in purpose. We once knew truly fierce wars. They split and then united the land."

The Hylian king considered this for longer than Ganondorf thought he would. But then as the man bent beneath the clouds, he laughed and motioned for his squire. "You speak with such gravity for one so young. Come, boy. Have a bout with me, and we will see who truly is the wisest in the art of war."

Young? It took a moment for Ganondorf to remember the body he had reclaimed had once been a duplicate, a phantom copy made only just after he'd grasped the Triforce for the first time. He'd hardly been a child when he'd done so, but an age of only twenty-seven years seemed like a mayfly's life to him centuries after the fact. The King General did not wait for him to acquiesce; his squire handed Ganondorf a wooden training sword without hesitation.

Fine, then. Ganondorf took it, turning it over in his left hand. His grasp felt as if through a thick woolen mitt.

"We will start now."

For the sake of maintaining his ruse, Ganondorf held back, despite the aching allure of flinging a fireball and simply being done with the man. Like playing with an exuberant child, he tried to tell himself. An obnoxious brat, even. Pity he'd never had a way with children.

The King had chosen a lighter sword than Ganondorf was familiar with, but he hardly had time to evaluate footwork before the man made an advance with astonishing speed. The King-General was by no means a small man: well-conditioned and unbowed by the age that was beginning to show upon him. Ganondorf deflected the blow, sliding to the right, meaning to circle and hit the man's exposed side. But to Ganondorf's surprise, the man would have none of it. The King spun on his heel, laughing, and made a leonine assault: never retreating, never defending. With his weak hand, Ganondorf could only attempt to parry, but he was continually foiled. Quickly he found himself stepping backward, began to feel blows against his skin.

The sting of the wood even caused Ganondorf to flinch. So uncharacteristic, so humiliating... Ganondorf found he had, somewhere between being an immolated corpse and a bodiless spirit, forgotten the extent of pain. He knew agony, he knew torment and suffering. But the feeling of a bruise beginning to blossom over his skin, the tiny aches and discomforts of mortality were long lost on him, and wholly unwelcome. They brought him down, down out of legend and out of nightmares: nothing more than flesh. All too late, Ganondorf realized that now, any man of sufficient skill with a blade could slay him, and any fool with a switch could beat him.

A snarl pierced his accommodating guise and he retaliated- how _dare_ this mortal and _tiny pest _stand against him...! And yet, reality did not conform to his wishes. The wooden shaft wouldn't arc correctly, his grip would shake as if his swordwork was an off-handed signature; his dominant arm hung useless in a sling tied around his shoulders. His entire right side constantly was exposed, helpless, and his footwork was slow. Every step had to be mirrored from what had previously been burned into his brain by _centuries _of experience, and what once was automatic now took a moment too long to process.

Suddenly he was disarmed. It was a whirl, a confusing rap on his knuckles and all at once the short pole was out of reach. He stared, dazed, enraged, at the green-eyed king before him and the thinner switch the man held. "Well fought," he said, as if appraising the untrained. "But size is not everything. You lack discipline. I suppose you will make a fine brute for the Queen's service."

Somewhere between his pride and his temper, temptation bit deeply into his mind, snarling in incoherency but above all _kill him._ Yet, in a rare feat of conviction, Ganondorf wedged it back into a corner and flatly told it, _no._

And Ganondorf did not like this.

He appeased himself with a _not yet._

"Your favor flatters me," Ganondorf spat.

"It should." he paused and turned back to his army. "Not many men, crippled or able, could have lasted even a minute against Calas Hyrule XI, High Lord of Springspass."

"You must be toying with me now. I want nothing of your empty court, or your company."

Zelda did not respond directly. Ganondorf's words scattered against the arched ceiling, followed by a faint echo in the barren hall. He could taste the dust in the air, shaken free by his outburst. It glittered in motes, shot through by the cracks of sunbeam from the lonely window to the gardens. Someone had seen fit to shutter it. Ganondorf did not relish the privacy.

"I am sorry for endangering my King with your presence," she said, "but he was to find a replacement for Kael and wasn't pleased when I insisted on you over his choices."

"Good. He ought to know he cannot protect his daughter from me. You and I know this very well."

"He is not my father," corrected Zelda. "He is my consort."

Ganondorf felt his boots begin to lighten. Interesting, he noted. An enchantment rooted in her will can fail somewhat to distraction. "What does it matter? He will not stand in my way for much longer."

"Yes, and that explains why you haven't escaped my care yet," said Zelda dryly. "Gods, I never dreamed the King of Evil would complain as much as you do. Not everyone gets their way."

She crossed her legs as she sat, tapping her fingers on the worn granite arms of her throne. Her shoulders sunk, and she slumped in irritation. Ganondorf almost wanted to demand she sit up straight. This reality was too strange as it was, and a Zelda that slumped and swore to the Gods about his behavior simply wasn't right. It occurred to him that he knew little of what was strange or not, as he'd rarely spent more than an hour in any Zelda's company peaceably. So far as he could be peaceable.

"In fact, it is my business to see expressly, above all else, that you do _not _get your way."

"Your greed-blind footman had misplaced faith in you. He would not tolerate any insult to your honor," said Ganondorf. "You are nothing but a cowardly jailer, with an ill-matched mate to take all affairs of your country away from you. You are no Queen."

Zelda looked up at him. She had to crane her neck, and she could not possibly have seen more than the underside of his helm from where she sat. "King is an honorable title only. Only because I was wedded to him," Zelda said, with bit-tongue patience. "It is my family's tradition, in this age, to lay claim to the greatest of warriors to continue the royal bloodline."

Ganondorf was not sure how to classify the feeling that washed over his limbs. It had been far too long since he stood corrected, and the wavering, awkward twitch in his limbs did not suit him. It was the sort of feeling that prompted long silences, uneasy to the stomach and humiliating to the mind. "And it is in that way you overcame my long victory. Like dogs: breeding one who could."

"She was ten. You killed her mother."

Ganondorf quickly changed the subject. This was out of control. "And this is why you shun the duties of your throne? You may as well lock me in a box, and get something done."

"I don't shun. All things have simply gone... quiet. I settle a trade dispute now and then. But this land is not as it once was. There are no foreign relations to be had. No settlements of peace to be re-affirmed. No affairs of state to settle. We are very much alone these days."

Inside his helmet, Ganondorf felt the steam of his own breath. "You all grow idle in my absence," he bit at her. "I have seen your lands. They are barren and fallow; what other, better things do your wretched peasants have to do in the depth of winter but live off their larders and pester their nobility?"

Ganondorf was not expecting her face to go hollow, exhausted. She straightened from her slump, and closed her eyes. It was a while before she spoke, and when she did the words dropped like lead weights from her lips.

"It is midsummer."


	7. 6

Unlike most stationed in the garrison they'd chosen to store him in, his duties began early and persisted throughout the day, whereas the others merely relieved the second-shift night guards sometime in mid-morning. As a result, he rose at dawn.

He took the time to see to his own body in that blessed period of solitude. It had been three weeks since the damned King had rapped him on the knuckles, and Ganondorf did not intend to lose in any possible rematch. It was too easy to neglect himself, he realized, when he had limited use of his arms. He had spent quite a long time dying and dead; any body at all, even a maimed one, was an advantage he did not mean to waste.

Even the simplest drills and exercises were drastically altered for him. The wad of rags he had pushed under his bad arm to even its length with his good one slipped. Ganondorf paused, adjusted it, and returned to pushing himself the ground down. Under his own bulk, it could have been either. Try as he might to convince himself that isolation befitted the Great King of Evil, in reality the image of himself, a crippled man pushing up for soldiers' exercises was more comical than Ganondorf was comfortable with and the laughter of ignorant men was not something he was prepared to endure.

He finished and stood, rubbing the sore pressure where the new metal cap for his arm met his skin, and marched quietly into the washroom. He up-ended a full basin over himself, washing at least a little grime down through the metal grating of the floor. He did not bother to wipe his hair out of his face, and instead set to trimming his beard. Whether he liked it or not, there were appearances that had to be kept.

His own face accused him as he looked into the polished steel mirror, as it did every morning now. Tame. You are becoming tame. Ganondorf regarded such thoughts as he would regard a passing noisy dog: with disdain and occasional irritation. He scolded himself for forgetting how to _work._ Long, long ago, Ganondorf once had to _work_ for his first great victory: enduring close to a year of annoyance and insult at the hands of an ancient Hylian king, only to find his plans accelerated by the foolish actions of a girl. After seizing the gift of the Gods, he no longer needed persistence to gain prizes, and merely plucked them from the hands of whoever happened to be in his way.

He was back to the beginning again, he reasoned. He had not _lost_, really— he was alive and he was capable of acting— but had simply been forced to start over. Which was not a bad thing in of itself, he thought; Ganondorf had seen more second chances than most had seen sunsets and he had taken advantage of every one. Let her have her petty enchantment. Every day she keeps it, he thought, is a day I have to discover how to break it.

However, that morning was unlike many others, because it was at that moment, he did think of a way to break it. He turned the honed-razor over in his hand, and thought: the spell that binds me, it binds a mortal man. Not my spirit, which the Gods have restored to life a hundred times.

It would be so easy, he thought, to exit the world, and return when things were more fruitful for him. He tested the blade, and found it still sufficient. Zelda is a fool, he laughed somewhere inside his head. She laid a trap for an immortal. I will eventually die, and be out of her power. I could even escape at this very moment.

He was halfway to slitting his own throat when that conclusion sunk into his mind. It stopped his hand immediately, but for an instant he didn't know why. Then, like the muffled rattle of a desert snake, the idea began to buzz around in his thoughts.

I will eventually die. His hand shook.

This should not frighten me as much as it does, he scolded himself. I have died many times, in agony and in torment. I have come out no worse for any of it.

And yet, _I will eventually die._

His face in the mirror already seemed to leer at him: skull-like, corpse-eyed. He became acutely aware of the air on his skin, the hiss of his breathing, the tiniest pricks of discomfort where his bare feet met the rough steel grate. His own heartbeat thundered in his ears, and he swore the flow of blood in him had _friction_.

Ganondorf put down the blade, disarmed. He could even see himself pale, as much as he could with his complexion. A bead of sweat crawled down his foggy, dull reflection. It was just a man.

A mortal man, who feared death. Ganondorf felt he could have been sick, and realized that he was. Death, he thought, was a terminal illness. One he had thought he had overcome: so far back on his list of priorities for centuries of the earth that just then it finally added up. It was like a barrage of tiny expenses, wages he paid to some dark idol. He had stung his knuckles and bloodied his own hands. He had been winded and bruised. He had been hungry and exhausted. He knew thirst. He hardly could fathom experiencing differently before. It was, after all, his natural state.

He had not noticed, but he was already too far gone: infected once again with all of the bodily fears and worries that came with a heart that ticked the moments away, approaching a distant death.

And he didn't know what to do about it. He dressed, and did not wait for the squires to come with his armor. He left the barracks. He was not tame, but he was also no creature to be penned in. The time had come, he thought, to break his fences.

He had such a limited time now, after all.

–

Zelda's private quarters were far out of the way of the castle's normal activities: far enough that the reeds and rushes sat undisturbed and clear: soiled only with dust. Ganondorf could almost see footprints in it, and the light feathering where the hem of a well-tailored gown had long brushed the ground. The walls were as bare as the rest of the castle: featureless cobbles punctuated every few horse-lengths by oil-soaked lamps. Like so many other identical halls, it reeked of smoke.

A guard, one of the loathsome men from the garrison where they housed him, stood at attention.

"I have come to relieve you," Ganondorf said.

"You most certainly have not," replied the guard. "My shift is not yet over, and you are not properly equipped for watch detail. Please be along."

"Such trivial details," Ganondorf said, boring his eyes into the guard's. Ganondorf's spell of domination was not so subtle or intricate as the ancient bindings that had been left as a trap in the deep basement vault, but it would do as a temporary measure. "I order you to leave your post. Your duty is done."

"My duty is done, my Lord."

"Now be off."

"I will be off."

And he was, setting away in a dazed stagger at first, but soon gathered himself and strode with purpose away from Zelda's door. He would hardly remember why he left or that Ganondorf had been there at all, but Ganondorf had made certain the guard would be far away when the confusion hit.

Ganondorf stood awhile, breath held, straining his senses for any evidence of life or movement. The hammer of his pulse interfered, but after a moment, he could discern soft breathing. He recognized the pattern: sleep. Perfect.

There was only one simple ward on the door: placed quite recently by someone with relatively little experience. Ganondorf broke it easily; a thousand years of skill made anything but deep, ancient magics as fragile as gauze to his dark arts. A simple alarm spell was woven into the enchantment; that was as easy to foil as anything else. A curse of silence upon the room served his needs quite well.

Soundlessly, the door opened. Ganondorf's muffled boots could not wake Zelda as she lay, deeply asleep in the early morning. Her quarters were fine, but unexpectedly simple: a large bed, a soft carpet, a bookshelf, and a dressing-stage with a mirror. Ganondorf supposed her maids entered and clothed her every morning.

His lips curled back, teeth baring a feral grin as he thought; this morning, they ought to bring a shroud.

Ganondorf approached her bedside in the unnatural stillness he had cast over the room. Sure enough, she lay there asleep: oblivious. Without an expression, her fine-boned face was more crystalline than hawkish: delicate and pale, like frosted glass glazed too brittle to bear any weight. Her long hair tangled over the pillow, dulled in disorder. Ganondorf's eyes traveled up the heavy quilt, finding her shape beneath it, and setting a single deadly fingertip over where her breast surely was. Her sleep was hardly serene; Ganondorf could see her shake and twitch, eyes fluttering behind paper-frail lids. Perhaps she knew in her dreams, thought Ganondorf, that she will not wake to see the sun.

If it is to her presence as Queen of Hyrule I am bound, he thought, better that she never sits upon the throne again.

Flames licked his finger, and the woolen quilt hissed and smoked. As he prepared to lance her through with a bolt of fire, she recoiled; doubling over in her sleep. She grasped the edge of her sheets desperately, a single white hand slipping out from under the cover.

It was bare, and that was enough to make Ganondorf stop.

She was indeed Zelda, _THE Zelda_, that much Ganondorf was absolutely sure. There was always a familiarity between them, as nemesis. He knew a Zelda when he saw one, and this girl was certainly the correct member of the royal family. Sometimes there had been more than one: the spirit split amongst a mother and a daughter, perhaps. But no less, and no more: always, when he came to bear, there was a Zelda waiting to oppose him. And when he reigned supreme, Zelda always managed to be born to challenge him. Where, then, was her piece of the Triforce? Where was _Wisdom_?

That had been half the point, he cried out in fury, yet his voice was hushed in the silenced room. That had been the ultimate, rather than immediate goal; yes, by slaying Zelda he could nullify her curse... but what then? What then with Power fled, and what then with Wisdom missing? What was he to do? There was no way to locate either without at least one of the three, and there was an army greater than even his had ever been standing by all around him. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do.

Ganondorf did not like the idea of impossibility. His philosophy was to simply do what could not be done: be it forbidden or futile. But at that moment, his shrieking brain concluded that there was no other explanation but that this had been purposeful: a strike against him. An esoteric, unthinkable move in an ancient game of war he had been playing with several Zeldas, some long-dead. One of them had hidden Wisdom far away from him, in preparation to make their descendant Ganondorf's jailer. Perhaps the same that had placed the irresistible lure of his missing Power so close in a simple vault with a set trap. What warden would put the keys in the prisoner's reach? No, he thought, it would be their game to make the prisoner _think_ it was _so easy..._to make that man run into his cage willingly and eagerly, only to have the door slam shut behind him.

But if it was a game of war, Ganondorf became for a moment a general. And no matter how his good fist screamed for her blood, he retreated. Even as thoughts of snapping her neck came to bear, thoughts of burning her alive, _consuming_ her seethed in his skin, he forced himself back through her door and removed his spell of silence. His flesh felt to bubble upon his bones: molten in protest.

There had to be another way.

–

And so for days and into a week later, Ganondorf, Master of Thieves, Lord of the Desert and King-Father of the long-forgotten Gerudo people, found himself in the library. Despite himself, he rather liked the library, and books in general. Even after the long corrosion of time, his memory of the first books he had ever chosen for himself and read was still painted clearly in his mind. It was all his caretakers could to to keep his young hands off of them, or at least control what entered his mind. They were not successful.

Even so, books were one of the few things, he had long discovered, that were able to order his mind. In their presence, the static in his blood grew frustrated, baffled, and eventually gave up: leaving him a creature of banked ashes: mind free to pursue the ideas written in ink on vellum and leafs of paper without burning them to cinders.

For all that he was considered barbarian somewhere in the deep past, Ganondorf did not doubt that he was well-read by the standards of Hylian nobility. At least, in the portions of his memory where he could recall having the patience for books at all.

Briefly he wondered if it was books at all, or some other unknown combination of formula that was so _kind_ at the moment to give him such _gracious _clarity of thought. Life was not always so easy... he returned soon to study.

Ganondorf shut the heavy tome and pushed it aside, his candle growing short beside him. He rubbed his temples, ignored that he was to play at having 'duties' in the morning, and opened the next manuscript in the stack he had piled high next to him. There had to be something, he thought, of what the dead Zelda did. Intricate curse-circles, binding runes, ancient Hylian dialects, did not come from nowhere. Somewhere in the expansive library of Hyrule Castle, there _had_ to be at least a hint or a clue as to the structure of the curse that held him in check. If the terms of the enchantment were not to be broken, Ganondorf supposed the only way was to delve into the structure of it all and unravel it there: he was not a great sorcerer for nothing, though the mode of magic was unfamiliar and strange to him.

"You are an impressive wizard, soldier."

The voice was not one Ganondorf had any wish to hear, and he did not look up from his studies. "King General. I suggest you leave my presence. I have no patience for you at the moment."

"And an impertinent whelp, if you presume to order a King," the grey-haired man scowled, pulling himself out from behind the corner of an oaken shelf. He looked up and down the thick stack of books, but his eyes did not linger on the titles for long. His lip curled in contempt."There are few magicians left in Hyrule, these days. Much less ones with the power to slay sound within an entire room. I learned much from the guard you removed, after he regained his senses. What, I wonder, did you mean to do in there?"

The king bared his own teeth by the candle's light. With the Queen long, long asleep, they were for the moment equals. "As King of Hyrule-"

"King consort," Ganondorf corrected, mouth twisting as he lashed out with words. "As a king, you are my lesser: a stock-sire and nothing more. And I see no brat children by your doing. You are beneath my attention."

King Calas Hyrule XI's eyes went wide with rage, though his tone was even. "My blood is as pure as hers. I am a descendant of the heavens and rightful King of Hyrule. My title is an artifact of desperate days. Days that contained the Evil One, that are long-dead and forgotten."

Finally, Ganondorf rose. As he stood, he could see the unsaid threat on the other man's face. If there was not an army of thousands waiting at the ready, Ganondorf would never have tolerated it. "If you knew anything of the Evil One, you would not be so sure in naming him a relic. No, I don't believe you know anything."

A smile split his face when he saw that familiar, intimate, so _usable_ note of jealousy in the King's eyes. So _usable_, so _hungry_ and _jealous_. His prior thought rung in his head: how could one remove Zelda? Death, yes. But that escape was no longer an option.

A _new_ escape stood in front of him, Ganondorf realized. The books were meaningless; his first approach had not been _entirely_ foiled. Zelda need not _leave_ the throne, he thought. Merely someone _else_ ought to claim it. And if not himself, what better avatar than a greedy, easily-bridled fool?

"She keeps all knowledge and importance for herself," Ganondorf began thoughtfully. "Along with your glory, and your victory. You once showed me your army, and it is hollow. It is a force on lease. You have nothing more than what this Queen allows you to have. Even as her elder, you are nothing more than her decrepit pet."

And the man stood, dumbfounded.

"You are not even permitted to strike me for this insult," Ganondorf sneered. "As her guard, I am of greater note and merit than you, King General. After all, you do not even know the _purpose_ of your blighted kingdom. Why it shambles on, and even why you yourself exist."

"And you are private to such secrets of the universe?"

Ganondorf straightened, head and shoulders above the king, and seemed to tower over even the ancient shelves with his height. "Your entire lurching, undead land exists for a single purpose: to keep your monarch alive and well. She has taken your power and built a great keep around herself. Like a mother of insects, she has colonized and harvested all surrounding lands until no competition remains. All so that she may breed, and beget another Queen. And that that Queen may beget a Queen of her own. Unto eternity, feeding until she has sucked you dry of nectar and promise."

All waiting, Ganondorf added within his mind, as sentinels to my return. Each leaving behind a husk, their very best plans, their most artfully contrived prisons for me. And yet as all women, they die. And their machinations are left orphans: with each next generation having an imperfect understanding of their use. The tower had not been a perfect prison, and this curse depended on the life of one family line remaining on the throne.

And as Ganondorf knew so _very well_, no regime was ever permanent.

"You are blasphemous," said the King, though Ganondorf could see the ideas putrefy in the man's eyes. Like a noxious bite, his words infected, and to Ganondorf's great satisfaction he could see the contagious anxiety of a very _power-sick _man.

He would not have to wait much longer.

"When the truth is considered blasphemy," Ganondorf said, "examine your idols."

–

Yet more days crept by. Yet more days Ganondorf tested her, each time trying to elicit a harmless command, each time testing if the curse had been broken, or if the King required further... encouragement.

"Your ill-matched mate is threatened by my presence," reported Ganondorf as he sat uncomfortably in the parlor. The chair was not made for a man as large as he. Perched upon it, he felt like a large bird seated tenuously on too small a twig. Zelda sat before him in one of her more modest gowns with a needle in hand, painting a minute line in thread across the even-weave of a half-finished sampler. Each stitch's creep was tiny: no longer than a seed of grass. Ganondorf felt his patience strain even watching another person work at completing the intricate needlework; he could not imagine sitting still long enough to do so himself.

Zelda almost seemed to ignore him, the fine point of her needle poking up through the white linen's weave. Her glove surfaced over the cloth and plucked it through, drawing the black thread up and back into the pattern. But after a moment of mouthed, quiet counting, she set the work upon her lap and regarded him seriously. "Perhaps you should take it as a compliment," she said dryly. "His claim to my hand is his might at arms, and now he is confronted with a man that I vouch as more formidable than his greatest lieutenants. None of _them_ have raised mountains, or frozen rivers."

"You flatter yourself. I have no interest in your frailty," Ganondorf sneered, lip curling in revulsion.

"Nor I your wickedness," Zelda said. "Nor Calas his appetite. As you have noticed, we stagnate. It is difficult to satisfy a man when there is no more accomplishment to be had, and the only battles to be fought are with the dry ground."

"The sun is as bright as ever," Ganondorf dismissed. "Your poor harvest will pass, ungrateful fool. You know nothing of hunger."

The comment was ignored, and Zelda took up her needle again and began inching her line of embroidery up, a perfect mirror of the pattern she had already begun. To her, it suddenly seemed far more interesting than the King of Evil.

"Enough!" he thundered, causing the curtains to quiver. "Do you mean to train me like an animal? To reward me with attention and punish me with neglect? How simple your mind is!"

Zelda's attention did not waver. She pulled taught her line of stitches, the curl of a graphed leaf in a geometric garden coming to bear.

"Look at me when I speak!"

He seized perhaps hundreds of hours of her work and between his good hand and his teeth, ripped it to a few rags, throwing it back at her in disgust. He spit the metal needle. It landed in her tea. For a few seconds, Queen Zelda stared at him, as if she was struggling to comprehend what had happened. Then she bit her lip. A shade of facade seemed to fall around her, and she crossed her arms tiredly as she sat back in the chair, hands now idle.

"You do know why I wish to speak to you tonight, Ganondorf," said Zelda quite suddenly, tone almost brusque. "You must know."

If she had lost patience or gained nerve, Ganondorf did not know, nor did he care. "I do not," he said. "Why should I know the mind of a little girl?"

"Tell me what you have done with the piece of the Triforce that was hidden under the castle," commanded Zelda.

There was no unbidden words, no involuntary confessions from Ganondorf. "Nothing," he replied truthfully. "Why in all hells do you think I would know?"

"You must be evading," Zelda said, eyes fixed upon Ganondorf. Her voice cracked: startling and hawkish. "Don't be ridiculous. You are the King of Darkness, and have held that share for untold centuries. It was imprisoned within one of your own limbs. You detected and sought it out the instant you were able. You even managed to reach it before the protective wards ensnared you."

The Queen Zelda stood, the pulled shreds of her needlework entirely forgotten. It slid off of her lap in tangles, soon trodden underfoot. She leered at him over the table, all pretense lost and all stone gone from her face. Her nose wrinkled: snarl-crunched.

"Do you seriously expect me to believe that you did nothing with it?"

Ganondorf's laughter rattled the poor glass of spirits that had been set in front of him. "Zelda the wise, indeed! I wonder if you are even the correct one, or if your worthiness has withered away with time!"

"Do not mock me!"

Ganondorf was unsure if it was a command, for his throat did not close in on itself.

"Damn you!" She yelled now, angry tears leaking from her eyes. They drew spidery lines in the white powder that dusted her face."My land rots in the sun and my people starve! I need it!"

"You should have taken it when it sat in the dungeons, far below your idleness," Ganondorf spat. "An age ago, your kin denied my people mercy and aid. Instead they slaughtered us until none remained. I owe you the same courtesy."

"King of Evil, I order you now," Zelda hissed, breath choking in her throat. "Tell me what you have done with the Triforce of Power."

Ganondorf rose now, towering over her. "You cannot order me to say what I do not know. Ask your damned heavens to save your filthy country."

"Then leave! Go back to your barracks, and harass me no more!"

When his limbs did not freeze, Ganondorf immediately knew what had happened elsewhere in the castle. He could almost feel the actions he imagined were happening floors below: noble families swearing fealty down in the bailey, an eager king crowning himself, soon to oust his competition. As Zelda's words faded from the air, it was quiet in the castle. Unnaturally so. Ganondorf's smile stretched wide, and as Zelda realized his movements were free, it swallowed her courage.

"Your curse is broken. Your words mean nothing to me."

In an instant, his nails dug into her small throat, but she did not gasp for air. His eyes locked with hers, and he found them white-ringed in terror. She had forgotten to breathe.

"I only regret it took me so long to wrench your throne away. Your greedy king will be next."

Ganondorf cast her aside, and she crashed through the glass of the parlor, plummeting to the balcony below. He turned on his heel, cape whipping behind him in the sudden draft.

Now, he thought, it was his time once again.


	8. 7

Ganondorf knew exactly where he could find Calas. Or at least he knew where he himself would be, given the same situation. Although Ganondorf had never taken this particular route to the throne, he knew very well that being crowned king took one of two happenings: a citizenry to agree, or a fundamental lack (incapability?) of argument. Ganondorf had always taken the latter route, as he lacked the required standing and reputation for other methods.

But between them and their shared ambition, Calas was more than privileged enough for the former.

The guards before the throne room obviously knew what had transpired for they reacted violently to the sight of Ganondorf, where others in the castle had not. It was unlikely the pact or contract ceding the nation to Calas had been made public. Good, thought Ganondorf. All the less confusion about who would take the throne. The two guards themselves were no trouble. The one closest to him found his eyes baked by a ball of angry red fire. The second, stunned by the heat and brutality of the assault, was easily cast down to the unswept reed-and-stone floor. Ganondorf crushed his neck with an iron-nail boot. From the two slain, Ganondorf removed a sharp, straight standard-issue blade. It was somewhat too short for his reach, but it would do. Then with a mighty kick he burst down the sealed door.

And there the man stood: Calas at the great throne, half a dozen noble lords and knights on one knee swearing fealty to their new King. No longer consort. And he would gather all of those additional voices of authority for him? Ganondorf could have thanked the man.

He didn't. The fire bolt he threw was a good enough response. Gut-piercing screams filled the moment, the familiar reek of cooking flesh immediately pluming up from the collective pyre. He could feel roasted fat form an oily mist over his skin. And so, he thought in satisfaction, yet another day is won. Ganondorf drew close to the veiled throne, ash dusting his heavy cape and feeling the lingering heat of the blast through the hard leather of his shoes as fire chewed at the stubborn carpet.

A silver flash emerged from the flame, followed by a fine satin glove, and then a whole man: dark smoke birthing him, billowing from his form as he cut through the haze. Ganondorf felt the lead in his left hand once more, and threw himself to the side. The lunge missed by mere seconds, and quickly swept to the left, blade following him like a streak of pale lightning. Scrambling for footing, Ganondorf repelled it, mind shouting competing curses in either ear. The coward! The scum! He had waited in the blast, somehow protected... waited for Ganondorf the great target to stray within range.

A sudden crash shook his balance, and in a daze of memory, Ganondorf remembered his tightly-bound, useless arm. The tip of Calas' sword had missed his breast, but easily cut the cloth sling to useless tatters. The arm, now free and limp, had abruptly been released; Ganondorf stumbled under the sudden change in weight and posture. Angrily, he struck out with his own blade, enraged at playing defender at his own coup. In triumph, he heard a cry of pain. But there was no cut-windpipe silence, no gurgling death, no extended scream of agony. There was only retaliation, a whip-like flick of a blade that was far too heavy for such artifice in the hands of anyone but a master.

And oh. The feeling of that steel, so very _familiar_ steel... it _clawed_, it seethed in his wounds,_ chewed and bit_his flesh. Even if it was merely a small wound on his off-arm, it cut to his core: shuddering him with numbing static.

It was only his strength of will that allowed him to step backwards, widening the dangerous gap.

"She told me _everything_, King of Evil," Calas cried out, the greasy smoke clinging to the hall's dirtied floor. "I know your wretched story. Try as you will! As long as I hold this blade, you can never harm me with your sorcery."

Ganondorf would have cursed, but that would have taken too much breath; Calas lunged again, and Ganondorf was forced backwards once again. Even a touch from the blade the man held spelled... death, Ganondorf realized. Mortality seethed in him, making his feet light: some part of him yearned to flee, shouted down by his pride and identity. "That weapon is not yours," Ganondorf sneered, wary of the Master Sword's bite. "You should not be able to hold it at all."

"I am heir to the heavens," replied Calas. "I may hold whatever I please."

Seeing no hope for stalling the man with words, Ganondorf flung a second bolt of fire. "Then catch."

He did not, however, but merely batted away the destructive burst, the dark magics repelled by the Master Sword's ambient aura. Ganondorf knew better than to be hit by his own strike; it devastated the back wall instead. This assassination was not going well, he thought. It was going the opposite of well. Badly.

"You know, I thought it would be a bother that the Queen chose you as her new guardsman over my choices," said Calas. "But you distracted her well enough. She hardly spent a moment without thinking of how to best contain you. I am on the throne early after all."

He must have been joking. Ganondorf was not amused. But he must not have meant it. Because if the man meant it, it further meant that Ganondorf had been played for a fool.

Ganondorf _hated that_.

An arrow struck the ground by his left foot, and in the upper gallery he could see the archers begin to flock. Another shot followed, with a sound like a steel hailstone upon the stone. A third needled the floor: this time striking dully into the heavy woolen carpet. And amazing, unthinkably, a sudden idea formed in Ganondorf's mind. It crept tenuously over the surface of his brain, as if in hostile territory. Retreat?

Absolutely not, much of him retorted. But when he considered the penalty of loss weighed against the chance of victory... neither side of the balance pleased him. Now soldiers were pouring in from the open door; what had seemed like a simple way out, the weak way out, had become immeasurably complex. He had to make an immediate choice, Ganondorf realized. This moment would become permanent.

Ganondorf fended off another savage lunge and attempted to parry but found his body already attempting to make the choice without him: unwilling when he tried to advance into the fray. That fray would be, in an instant all-too-close to escape.. A dark allure crept into his thoughts, the idea to let his talent for destruction rule him even if just for a moment, to just give in... but to what? Ganondorf was not sure if he had ever truly known or understood, but even if the choice in the grip of panic looked alluring... he had done it all before.

It hadn't turned out well centuries prior. Why would it now?

And so to his humiliation, Ganondorf ran. For perhaps the first time in his life, soul aching and pride whining like a scorned dog, he turned heel and crashed a wake through the advancing, lesser foes. Shielded from the perilous Calas by their backs, he recalled the reaction of the guard in the hall and let loose a torrent of flame. He'd meant only a burst of light, but in the moment he didn't care if they all lost their eyes in the process, so long as he could survive. While all present leapt back in terror, Ganondorf sheathed his sword and _fled_.

But to where? With what? On what? How far? For how long? Ganondorf realized that retreat was difficult. Out of the castle, at least. Out of the town. And quickly. But first...

Emerging out a side-door, Ganondorf evaded several running, searching soldiers by ducking behind a display of statues. Then, he looked up to spy a particular third-floor window, and below that, a particular second-floor balcony. There was no way up.

Ridiculous. However diminished, you are the greatest sorcerer the world has ever seen. Have you grown so dull, so complacent? You have traversed the spirit realm and gone so far as to steal a man's face. Lifting your own self should be a trifle. Carefully, Ganondorf felt the spell in the depths of his memory: a complex one in truth. Moving one's own mass was somewhat more difficult than moving a stationary object: requiring dynamic reference points and...

To hell with it. Ganondorf nearly catapulted himself over the railing, heavily misjudging the amount of power required to lift a body somewhat more compact than his more aged forms in the past. He skidded ungracefully on one heel, but managed to keep his shoulders square and his head straight, and stuck the landing.

Zelda was still there. And regardless of what happened, Ganondorf would not allow Calas to keep her.

Unfortunately, the addition of a prisoner supplemented his tenuous lack-of-a-plan with several complications. Would she slow him down? How was he to transport her? She would easily be recognized. How could he contain her? She seemed unnaturally still. Ganondorf's prior concerns were replaced with one more immediate;was she even alive?

Ganondorf clenched his good fist in anger as he roughly turned her over. If he'd ruined yet another thing by killing the potential bearer of wisdom in the heat of the moment, he wasn't sure if he could restrain his frustration. She was covered in painful streaks: some shallow, others deeper. None gushed, but broken glass clawed red slashes into her delicate skin. From how she had lain on the ground, her collarbone was surely broken. She breathed— shallowly.

She could not be moved in this state, he concluded. Anyone familiar with even the most basic of battlefield wounds would have thought the same... even if Ganondorf often was more concerned with inflicting them. Closing them had never been his strong suit. But if he was going to claim her and form an eventual substitute for his failed attempt, he could not let her fester. Ganondorf envisioned her skin clean, imagined the sound and sight of a broken breast and then reversed the motion. Then he attempted to model some mimicry of healing arts around said images.

Zelda cried out, violently repulsed. That was interesting, Ganondorf thought. She is as hindered by my magics as I hers. As diverting as the idea of tormenting her for her troubles was at the moment, it was hardly useful: and his attempt had done nothing to make her more mobile. Ganondorf looked over his shoulder; he hadn't the time for this nonsense. If he kept the work simple, he thought, neutral even, her instinctive defenses would allow him to at least keep her from dripping all over the place.

Ganondorf had to dig surprisingly far into himself to find spell-work that did not burn her skin. Searingly warm, perhaps, but hardly the fires of hell he preferred. And pitifully weak: perhaps some cantrip from childhood, used for lighting candles. Scant, it sufficed. Her shoulder aligned itself properly, and tiny grains of sand, once glass, were forced out of her wounds as they closed. Her skin was smooth again... but Ganondorf was not expert enough to prevent the ghostly tracks of scars curling across her arms, and creeping over her pale cheekbones.

Good enough. He picked her up and carried her over one shoulder, only to find men had caught him upon the balcony. To Ganondorf's great annoyance, he could neither cast magic nor draw his blade with his hand full. Their steps quickened, and their spears closed the distance instantly. Ganondorf's off arm moved to catch a shaft on reflex, but without fingers he merely threw the aim off. With great effort, Ganondorf managed to trip the man with his height. There was no point fighting anymore: with a captive...

Yes! A captive!

"I will snap her neck if you draw closer," Ganondorf threatened, choking Zelda threateningly. She gasped, boneless in his grip.

To Ganondorf's surprise, the remaining man either was of great conviction, or did not care for the Queen's life. Calas meant to usurp her anyway, Ganondorf thought, and she is now of little value to him.

Fine. More for me, then.

Ganondorf seized the magic of flight again, and rocketed off of the balcony, only to find that with Zelda as payload his balance was critically off. Unable to halt his ascent, he spun dangerously out of control as he nearly brushed the outer curtain wall of the castle. Half-hearted arrows chased him, but soon he was far out of their range. In a rare panic, Ganondorf desperately tried to limit his acceleration; something had gone wrong, very wrong, and he didn't understand what it was. From the size of the blast in the throne room, to his ability to control a simple self-levitation spell, his ability to throttle the amount of spell-power he allotted was utterly gone. Ganondorf found himself hurtling towards Castle Town like a stray comet; to his horror the sorcery poured out of him, as if it was trying to escape.

This day could not become worse, he thought. In an attempt to seize control of himself again. Ganondorf harnessed every ounce of his will into a single command: STOP. With extreme difficulty, he forced his destructive, potent magics back into the bottle within his soul, where it beat at its confines. Ganondorf almost relaxed his grip on Zelda, until he realized that instead of flying, he was now falling. He stopped himself from instinctively reaching back into the hole he had just placed his suddenly-perilous power.

A white-plastered building was far too close now. Ganondorf called upon that weak, child's strength to shield him from harm, nearly without faith that it would help. Almost at the last second, he turned his right shoulder, host to only his useless arm, to bear the brunt of the damage. Ganondorf awaited the familiar feeling of splintered bone and pulverized flesh. He hit the building, and was strangely numb save for the great shower of dust.

As wavering as it was, the shameful substitute for his normal wealth of magical might at least was steadfast and faithful.

Coughing, Ganondorf found himself crouching prone in a pile of refuse and debris, a halo of white chalk-plaster powder hovering around him. To his amazement, Zelda was unharmed: he had managed to hold up his own bulk and had not crushed her with the landing. She coughed in his face, and he winced: her breath was sour.

"You... and what... where is this...?" she mumbled, groggily trying to focus on her surroundings.

Ganondorf scowled and removed himself from her, dusting himself off. "This is the least convenient time for you to regain consciousness."

"You _threw me_ out a _window_."

Zelda's statement was just as dazzled as it was angry. Ganondorf would have asked her why she expected anything less until he remembered the perils of engaging a Zelda in discussion. It gave her more time to discern her surroundings and advantages. Ganondorf peered out of the back alleyway they had fallen into. They'd made a lot of noise, and he doubted anyone could have _failed_to see him plummeting from the sky. He saw Zelda attempt to stand. She was in Ganondorf's grasp in less than a second, great bulk towering over her.

"You are my captive now, you disgusting insect," he growled. "You answer to me, you go where I say, you do what I tell you. You are useful only as your potential to house divinity in your flesh, and when you do happen upon it your utility ends. There is no one now who will save you. Not your empire, and not your filthy King."

Zelda's look of horror seemed to flatten. In her eyes, the world rolled up, terror so tight that it broke and became dull incompassion. "It was Calas, wasn't it?"

Ganondorf shook her violently. "I will punish you, girl, such that centuries in fire and anguish shall seem a pittance compared to the price of crossing me."

"He wanted to replace Kael with some hand-picked servant. I suspected he didn't have the greatest intentions in the long run."

"I am not talking about him!" Ganondorf nearly roared, all-too ready to give her a second lump on the head to match her first.

Zelda, to his surprise yelled back. "I am! You are free, I have failed the throne, Calas is free to do as he pleases, and if you have failed to stop him,_ I have lost! You have lost!_"

Ganondorf paused. Very rarely did a Zelda shed tears. Very rarely did a Zelda scream. Not even at the end of the world. Not even halfway into oblivion. Not even in the face of a dark death of all hope and promise. All of which had eventually faded, all of which Ganondorf supposed a Zelda had no reason to cry about; her boundless wisdom had long known each ultimate outcome. To see such fear, doubt, and uncertainty in this Zelda's eyes momentarily stunned him. Only the scars that now webbed her arms and face proved to him she was not some perfect body double.

"Or do you normally proclaim victory filthy in an alley?" Zelda asked weakly, slumping in his grasp. "What did he do? Is he truly fearsome enough even to defeat the King of Evil?"

Ganondorf did his best to hide his true expression, but somehow she seemed to glean the appropriate information from him anyway. Her look of defeat and awe was enough to make him throw her away. If she was not valuable beyond the comprehension of mortal men, Ganondorf would have left her there.

"I hoped that the greatest terror in all of time would stall him," said the once-queen bitterly, shaking her filthy, scored dress free of chalk. "One in a long list of hopes that did not come true."

"Stop _talking_," Ganondorf hissed, heedless of her sense of shock. "I will not be defeated by some inbred, upstart lord of some hilltop creek. This merely a setback."

Zelda hobbled closer, gathering her dress and tucking it unceremoniously into her belt, reducing its volume. Her shoes were hardly optimal, but far less impractical than circumstances could have led them to be. She was still shaking, but seemed to be containing herself as well as Ganondorf could expect a Zelda to. "Then I assume you have some sort of plan?"

"Survive."

He picked her up unceremoniously and shifted her to his off arm: the metal cap digging into her gown as he balanced her on his shoulder as so much baggage. As Ganondorf stepped out into the square, he saw soldiers. He saw soldiers upon soldiers, swarming in from every corner of the city. He saw civilians fleeing to their houses, gathering up their scant wares, and holding tight their children.

Ganondorf saw victims. Pride wounded, he hoped that if not victory, his attempt on Hyrule's throne would end in infamy.

With his free hand, the greatest sorcerer in Hyrule's history let loose his uncontrollable power, so _barely _shaped around the great statue in the castle town square. Ganondorf could see the soldiers flinch as a shudder ran up the stone, falter as the house-high image of the hero stepped down from his granite pedestal, and flee as its stone blade swung high into the air.

Close enough.


	9. 8

"Yes, very good," Zelda said breathlessly. Her tone of voice implied the contrary: her vowels round with open-mouth disgust as she doubtlessly saw the great statue in the square hew down many of what were once her soldiers. "But now...?"

Ganondorf noticed her slipping, but she righted herself without him: clinging desperately to his shoulders. How peculiar, he thought, that given the choice between an enemy that transcended death and death itself, she would choose the former. Hylians were truly cowardly creatures, and furthermore her question was absurd. Ganondorf ignored it and began making for the town gates.

Zelda yanked his hair. "Not that way!" she hissed in his ear, though for her boldness he could hear the uncertainty in her voice. It was more disruptive than her demand or even her unwelcome tugging: alien for any Zelda and unwelcome to him. "That is the second largest gatehouse in the city!"

"Then it will burn," Ganondorf said, sure he could put the undesirable situation with his magic power to good use somehow.

He could feel her struggle, shivering. "And what when you step beyond the gate and find us covered in tar, or shot through with arrows?"

"Your infernal city has only one exit," Ganondorf replied, swatting her angrily. "You brought this upon yourself."

Ganondorf could hardly stand still in the middle of the street, with chaos reigning all around him, in full sight of archers or who-knew what else a fully-realized military state could send to collect him. But to his annoyance, Zelda spoke again before he could manage to find shelter.

"We can escape through the aqueducts," she stammered. "You must have seen them. There is a passage only a little to the west."

Ganondorf found he could not ignore her now; if she desired survival as much as he, her words were likely sincere, even if she was so weak as to fall to panic, he thought. "Surely your impregnable city-fortress cannot have such an obvious weakness."

"It did," admitted Zelda. "But we eliminated the Zora, so it doesn't matter."

Ganondorf altered his course west, pushing past shrieking commoners as he did so. But eventually, he was lost to notice: the streets deserted. Windows were shuttered, and curtains were drawn. There was a weight in the air, one that reminded Ganondorf of the old days when he once had walked this city as its tyrant, its absolute ruler and the master of fate. No one dared to challenge him, then. He expected this to lift his spirits, even a little. But even as his heavy boots tore the old slate slab city street under him, he could not help but think of all of the differences.

The enormity of it hit him. These streets bore fresh use: wagon wheels cutting worn white trails through their blankness. These streets did not respect him. Ganondorf did not sit in the tower far away. These were very much like the streets that, so long, long ago had once faced him when he had entered the city for the first time in his absurd, over-stretched recollection.

He hadn't felt this sort of uncertainty since then, and like a scent calling to mind reminders of the past, this sour feeling was a memorable stench in of itself. In those days, many regarded him as a thief, a killer, and foremost as _nothing at all_. Once upon a time, he had a barely-regarded kingship. Now, child of the sand, somewhere in his mind he knew that to many he was worth just as much as sand once again.

"I'm sorry," Zelda said quite suddenly. Her words echoed in the streets, accompanied only by the soft sound of Ganondorf's boots and the dull, ever-more-distant cacophony of the quickly dying conflict in the square.

"You ought to be," Ganondorf snarled.

"I wasn't even alive when they conquered the high springs. My mother saw the last Zora, not me."

Typical, he thought. Of all the things to be sorry for, out of a hundred lifetimes of privilege and more murders of his own person than Ganondorf could count, that triviality was what the worm royal child chose to regret. Ganondorf did not reply, but merely added her statements to the vast list of reasons why her bloodline should have died long ago. The painful minutes passed as they drew nearer and nearer to the great reservoir that hulked in the distance. Ganondorf needed little guidance. He had seen the stone silo often from the window slat in his tower prison. It seemed far larger in person: a huge cistern, ringed by a covered pool.

"Put me down," Zelda demanded, prying at the cold metal cap to Ganondorf's imprisoning arm. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her gaze draw up to the tops of buildings, to several wooden scaffolds. Clearly she knew this place was guarded, though those that patrolled seemed to have abandoned their posts. Even if temporarily.

"Where is the passage, girl?" said Ganondorf.

"I told you, put me down. It is underwater," replied Zelda. "We will have to swim."

"Do not try to run," Ganondorf warned as he let her down, slinging her like a bundle of sticks. "Or I will break your legs."

Zelda stumbled, shaking like a reed. But she seemed to compose herself quickly enough: bunching up her skirts and tucking them into her belt, revealing delicate calves. "I would love to see how far you get carrying me," she said, words wild and almost frenzied. Ganondorf gazed at her troubled expression, somewhat puzzled. It took him longer than most would to recognize her behavior as possible signs of shock.

How inconvenient. Perhaps he should have tried to send her to sleep after all.

"And where would I run?" she asked coldly. "To my death?"

Good, thought Ganondorf of her shaking terror and spitting words. Perhaps now she understands how far one can fall from power. He watched her as she carefully climbed up the rough slab-and concrete construction to slip into the deep settling-pool.

"I don't swim," said Ganondorf.

Zelda looked back at him, pulling up over the wall again. Her long hair had come undone in the water, and it hung limply before her eyes before she wiped it out of the way. "What?"

"I do not swim," he repeated.

"All of this time, we could have put you on an island?" Zelda said, incredulous. "Who knew?"

Ganondorf glared at her viciously. "I would sooner try flying out."

"I don't know what happened with Calas," Zelda admitted. "But I don't think it went particularly well if you, King of Evil, were compelled to flee. If you could fly out of here, why haven't you done it already?"

The honest answer was 'I do not plan to collide with more buildings,' but that would involve admitting to her that he had lost critical control of some very dangerous magics. Beyond actually having to show defeat, Ganondorf was not sure he could stand yet another blow to his ego. Note, he thought: she is insufferable when correct. Do not let her be. He reached with his good hand and vaulted himself over the stone rise with an enormous splash of entry. The chill water met his skin immediately, and for a moment he was paralyzed. Blurrily, Ganondorf could see the layers of Zelda's gown hanging heavily in the water, and her furious legs kicking to stay afloat. The few pieces of steel armor he wore dragged him down as well, and his screaming mortality suddenly reminded him... you cannot breathe, you are drowning.

Choking, Ganondorf pulled up on the stone wall and broke the surface of the water, pressing himself to its stone-slab roughness to hold himself still. Zelda bobbed in front of him in a controlled manner, her treading rhythmic and ordered. "There is an opening below," she explained in between gulps of air. "The silo drains through it."

Then, to his displeasure, Ganondorf watched her slip beneath the grey surface. Her shadow struggled underwater, slowly gliding to the dark stone wall of the cistern. There was a momentary pause, and suddenly Zelda vanished inside. If she surfaced, he did not know.

Zelda could hardly be permitted to escape without him, Ganondorf thought. Clumsily, he did his best to imitate her movements and swim across the pool, but found with only one useful arm he spun in circles. Somehow he managed, feeling like he was fighting the weight of an iron anchor—his own weight—all the way. Ganondorf flattened himself to the silo wall with great difficulty, and began to push himself down below the surface, fighting every instinct he had to hold his breath. Soon his hands felt an unhinged metal-bar shutter and a large circular hole in the construction. A gentle current of water flowed out of it. Lungs burning, he pulled himself through and then tore himself up to the surface like a madman under threat of death.

"And what is your grand idea, girl?" he sputtered. It was murky inside, but sound was sharp against the hard stone: he could hear the rush of water pouring in from some fountain far above him. The haze was cut by stark lines: shadows of iron grating that formed the last few feet of wall above the looming roof. Ganondorf knew little about the engineering of such an elaborate watershed, but he did recall the effects of flash-floods on rivers, and he supposed that if the whole contraption was to overflow, those windows that were their only light would serve as drains to prevent flooding of the aqueduct system.

Origins from dust indeed, Ganondorf scoffed, almost straining to think back so far in his memory. If the ancient Gerudo had known anything that would be envied by Hylians, it was the capture and movement of precious water.

"We have to get up there," said Zelda, motioning to the wide opening through which the water gushed. "It leads west and north, up into the mountains. But we shouldn't follow it so far."

"We could be flushed like rats, yes," Ganondorf added angrily, clinging to the wall and squinting in the dark. A heavy waxed cord ran up into the gloom: connected to pulleys high above them both. It occurred to him that it was likely the mechanism to a shutter or door: to open and close the hole he had swam through.

Zelda looked up, a woebegone look in her eyes. She hadn't anticipated the height problem, most likely. "Can you climb?"

"Be silent," snapped Ganondorf as he felt the thick rope in his grasp. Behave, he demanded of his power, and tried to let loose the tiniest drop. All of it nearly poured from his hand before he stopped it. Angrily, for a third time he called upon the far weaker wellspring in him, and the tar-wax coating melted from the cable. Then the fibers burned black. At last they snapped, and with a heavy shriek of metal, a gate did indeed crash down on the drainage opening, sealing the chamber.

Soon the the reservoir began to fill. Like a drowned spider, Ganondorf shuffled across the reservoir's curved wall to the other side of the chamber, and lifted by the water level he steadily climbed in altitude. Zelda bobbed next to him, mouth thankfully shut, until the maximum capacity was reached and they were even with the aqueduct. A quiet thunder could suddenly be heard: a flood spilling out of the top of the silo, into the covered reservoir and ultimately the streets below.

A waste, Ganondorf thought, but necessary. He crawled up into the dark passage, sodden and disgruntled, and saw Zelda attempt to pull herself up after him. He seized her by the wrists and dragged her out.

"From now on, you speak only when spoken to, and obey my commands without question," Ganondorf snarled, finding the hollow eyes and stone face that met him dissatisfying. "I tolerate no more of your chatter."

She nodded, and he set her down. He wondered if her magic had diminished: arrows that once had proven fatal to him had been used to merely stun him, and she had not tried any arcane arts whatsoever in escaping him now. What rituals and spellcraft he had seen from her had either been laid down long before her birth, or excruciatingly simple. Then again, he thought... she clearly had no confidence in her power to repel her King-Consort herself, and had seemingly appointed him the task.

Ganondorf pushed away the possibility in his mind that she may have dreaded this day, perhaps for longer than he had experienced of this particular lifetime.

"How far is it to the nearest exit?" Ganondorf asked sharply.

"Six miles," replied Zelda. Her voice cracked. "We would emerge to the west."

Ganondorf pushed her ahead, and she stumbled: shivering and teeth chattering. "West will do," he said. "Walk. I will not carry you."

And so they began their flight from Hyrule: one wretched step at a time.

-

After half a day of forced march, they emerged from a miserable stonemason's hatch. Ganondorf had to force his shoulders through, but it was worth it to stand on the dry ground once more. With great difficulty, Ganondorf pulled off his boots and drained the sour water from them. But that was the extent of his pause; he forced the chilled Zelda onward, even as the sun began to dip close to the horizon. Movement would keep her warm enough.

Whether Zelda was silent out of obedience or understanding, or simply terror, Ganondorf didn't care to discern.

The difference even a few miles from the castle town was striking. Where the lands between Death Mountain and the castle were still green, even if stunted, here little but the least desirable plants dared shove through the cracked earth at their feet. Ganondorf stared out, and wondered if he had overshot the distance, but the position of the mountains was unmistakable. What had once been dark loam was dry and flaking: the landscape was littered with stumps of dead trees where they'd been salvaged and the the boarded-up remains of farms and barns.

Ganondorf noticed Zelda gravitated instantly in the direction of the closest one, eagerly awaiting shelter. "No," Ganondorf said, blocking her path. "Don't be a fool. They will have long figured out which way we have gone. Our water passage masks our scent from dogs, but all that separates us is the speed of their horses."

He could see her blink, uncomprehending. Then a look of horror spread over her face. Yes, he thought. She is not used to dishonesty, she is not used to fear and hiding and being hunted. Enough to drive a man to desperation, and she was ignorant to the feeling. At once Ganondorf took delight in her haunted anxiety, yet also detested that she had learned of the hardship.

Enemies were not meant to understand one another, Ganondorf concluded. He did not need a Zelda that... pitied.

They walked along together in silence, clinging to what little cover there was. Their shadows grew long behind them and eventually vanished as the sun ducked below the high-cut cliffs in the distance. Ganondorf did not know what he would find in the desert, other than that it would be much-changed by a river bursting its banks, but out of every direction west was the only one that Hyrule had not managed to conquer.

The reason was simple, he thought. As ever, there was nothing there of worth to them. As humiliating as it was, Ganondorf was in need of at least temporary asylum, and the inhospitable sands and cliffs would do well to repel pursuers.

For the few more miles they made that day, Ganondorf spent the time watching Zelda stumble on in front of him. From time to time, she would rub her hands and blow on her fingers, or shove them in her armpits. In the light of the half-moon her hair almost seemed to creep up into snarls and waves, a thousand brush-strokes in the leisure of her tower undone by the drying of her damp braids as they had unraveled. As the march wore on, he found her slowing. He began to push her forward from time to time, shoving her back into pace when she lagged and nearly crashed into him.

"This is where we will rest," said Ganondorf about the next high patch of brambles and weeds they came across. "We obviously can cover no more distance tonight."

In the evening murk, Zelda began to reach for dry weeds and sticks with which to make a fire. Ganondorf slapped them out of her hands. "A camp will draw attention," he said, in exasperation. "You will do without luxury."

She collapsed to the ground obstinately, surprising Ganondorf: for such a spineless creature, her look of anger was very real. "You do realize that there is no advantage here I have in being alive," Zelda said darkly. "My kingdom is lost. I am the captive of a demon who needs me only for my birthright. To forever escape the searchers of Hyrule, and to deny you, all I need to do is starve."

"But will you, girl?" Ganondorf said dryly. "Will you truly forsake your kingdom? Will you let it rot in the hands of your bed-mate? Your line will surely end, and no Zelda will ever be born again. Besides, I have no food for you. You will starve tonight either way."

Ganondorf smiled widely, victory on his tongue. "Pray for a hero to save you, girl. Pray to the heavens; that seems to be all you ever do."

"The heavens have forsaken us," Zelda said coldly.

Ganondorf began to remove his metal pauldrons, and after that his cuirass. He could not rest in either of them. "Then you will manage like the rest of us," he spat. "On your own scant merits, rather than the favor of gods."

Zelda opened her mouth to retort, but closed it slowly and exhaled. Defeated, she curled up on the ground, balled and shivering for warmth, and closed her eyes. Free of her opposition, he removed his cape and was soon in only his light clothes, Ganondorf leaned against the stump of what once had been a well-established oak. The lingering dampness steamed off of him, clammy on his bare skin against the evening air.

He had just only closed his eyes to rest when he heard Zelda begin to sob quietly where she lay in the dust.

Only an idiot would not discern why a girl such as she would cry. Ganondorf, for all of his atrocity, all his history of kingslaying, understood what great motivator loss was. He knew loss. He and loss were even intimate. It was loss that took him back every time he eventually fell, and it was the fear of loss that likely had begun his great endeavor in the first place.

In her ambition, she and her line had reached for far more than they could have ever hoped to keep. Occupied with it, this Zelda had been blind to her downfall approaching. Everything she had, she had now lost. And everything she dreaded and feared, was ever warned about by her ancestors, had befallen her.

Even in his most desperate straits, Ganondorf had never been left with absolutely nothing upon his fall. Except this time, he realized: he and this Zelda shared a single nothing between themselves.

Ganondorf turned over and hushed his own thoughts before fear could claim them. Yes, he concluded... enemies were not meant to understand one another.

Zelda sobbed until he finally passed into sleep.

Understanding led to pity.


	10. 9

Ganondorf was appalled that Zelda slept most of the next day, but thankful for it. Lying low in the scrub, he had heard the hooves of horses clatter by more than once, and in the open, dusty terrain he was quite sure any searching riders could have seen a pair of two easily. Especially one burdened by a noblewoman in a gown, unused to covert travel.

He resented it. But out of the deep well of his past, Ganondorf remembered a time when his people, and by proxy he, were forced to move in shadow and by dark whenever they wished to travel abroad. It was an era he had sought to end, and ended it he had... though he had long, long outlasted his sisters. It had returned again, thought Ganondorf, and it was utterly unwelcome. After covering her sleeping body in a shroud of long grass and dead leaves, Ganondorf left her to survey the land unimpeded.

The roads were patrolled, he found, and he avoided them. However, as the day went on, the survey likewise passed on: convinced that their quarry had fled the area without them. By noon they had fanned north and south, and as the sun began to sink, they had long vanished from the western countryside, leaving only a few rearguard to act as sentinels. Ganondorf evaded their watch just as easily.

The crisp air from the mountains was a stark contrast to the blistered ground: if the air was cold, the sun was hot, and Ganondorf spent longer than he liked in finding a well. The spring he found was icy and metallic, leaching from the jutting rock. After slurping greedily, he found he had no vessel to carry a supply in. Grudgingly, he set to magic once more.

Use me! His dark power screamed. Use me now, and use me forever!

Ganondorf did not trust it, for the time being. Not after it had sent him spiralling into a brick wall. The other wellspring would have to do, unfortunately. A waterskin was simple enough, but Ganondorf had little confidence in its ability to conjure such a complex, delicately structured substance as leather. Instead, he decided glass would do; it was heavier, and fragile, but immensely simpler with its amorphous, frozen-liquid makeup. A bottle was an easy object, he tried to remind himself, comprised of only a solid cylinder with a hollow and a neck with which to fit a cork.

However, shaping one with this inferior hand was much like swordwork with his current handicap: wobbling, with a weak grasp and no coordination for details. Ganondorf produced a few strange, oblong lumps before he managed a somewhat lopsided bottle. He filled it with water, and fashioned a simple plug out of a core of wood. Task accomplished, Ganondorf set off back to his sparse camp.

When he returned, however, he did not find Zelda sleeping in the underbrush like a hidden fawn, but instead found her sticking her fingers in a freshly-opened jar of jellied pickle.

"What is _that_?" he scowled in distaste. "And where did you get it?"

Zelda licked her finger thoughtfully, and then replied, "There is an abandoned farmhouse not far from here. You forbade me last night from taking shelter there, and there is a full pantry of forgotten preserves." She squinted at the faded label on the mason canister. "I believe this one is bush-berry."

"I told you to stay where you were."

"You did not tell me anything," replied Zelda. "I awoke to find you gone, and I was hungry."

Ganondorf ignored his own stomach's snarls and knocked the jar out of her grasp. It hit the ground with a dusty thud, spilling its contents into the dirt. "Are you _incapable_ of heeding a simple command? You are to do _nothing_until I so dictate, for your sake and for my own." He nearly lifted her from the ground, visions of knights and soldiers ever-approaching in his mind. "You know nothing about moving unseen, know nothing about the tenacity of your pursuers, know nothing of the toil of being hunted."

He nearly spat in her face. "This is not some noble hunt."

"I know," she said breathlessly.

Like so many other aspects of her, her facade of boldness was that: a veil, a cover. Ganondorf knew this now; he saw her cower, shrink before him. Quite likely she had never been made to submit to anyone, full of Hylian pride and rashness. For every order she had once forced him to submit to, Ganondorf could imagine her willing: bowed by fear. Indeed, he ignored the steel glint in her eye, and the set of her jaw. If he was to cement her as his prisoner, no amount of respect or power was to be afforded to her.

Ganondorf knew that her weakness, in her suffering him, in her allowing him limited choice and resenting her control over him, was what had eventually allowed him to run free. He did not want to see her given the same chance.

"Water," he said, shoving the bottle he had produced at her. She stared at it for a second, stunned, but took it gingerly. He had sized it for his hands, and the foggy, badly-tempered glass was more like a small pot to her. She drank quickly and without delicacy, rinsing her tongue clean where the preserves had stained it blue. Her delicate, sticky fingers left smears on the unpolished surface.

Zelda did not drain even half of the contents, and instead held it back out to Ganondorf wordlessly, as if expecting he would take a drink as well. "Keep it," Ganondorf said. "You will need it far more than I."

She stared at it, but then corked it closed once more. Her hesitation was strange to Ganondorf, but she picked up the discarded jam jar and its cork stopper and shook the dirtied contents out, leaving it sticky but empty. Zelda offered it to him, and for a moment Ganondorf was not entirely sure what to do.

"You get one, too." Zelda said simply.

—

The first arrow whistled past Zelda's ear, striking the rock bluff beside them. A shower of shale chips pelted her shoulder, but before a second shot could follow, Ganondorf nearly threw her against the steep hill opposite the impact. The dry channel's layer of litter and gravel shifted under their feet. It was clear, Ganondorf determined, that the inhabitants of the area had once attempted to irrigate the withering land before they had left. This site hadn't been successful; they'd passed other, somewhat more prosperous farms, but they all barely seemed to make subsistence.

That hardly had to do with the arrow, however, other than that the abandoned canals made far kinder roads than the beaten dirt path west, which was exposed to the elements.

"Soldiers?" Zelda croaked, throat caked with dust.

"Thieves," Ganondorf corrected, noting the poor chicken-feather fletch of the failed arrow. The answer was quite plain to him: where there are highways, however makeshift, there are highwaymen.

Zelda sighed in relief. "I suppose that's a bit better," she said. "We have nothing of value."

"Don't be a fool," replied Ganondorf. "The gold stitching and the fabric of your dress, however damaged, carries worth. What little armor I still wear carries worth. Your bounty, if they know your face, carries worth. Your body, if they do not know your face, does as well."

Zelda wiped her hair out of her face, squinting into the grey sky against the pale sun. "Then we need to turn back."

"I am sure your empire will pay anyone willing to point them in your direction," Ganondorf said. "None here must be left alive." Without an order for her, Ganondorf dug his heavy boot into the face of the canal's wall, feeling it split the dry dirt. Stabbing his grasp-less arm into the face, he heaved himself up; with his great height, it was only a few lengths of his body to the top. Soon enough, his hand tore upwards and grasped a wooden bow, ripping it from the archer's hands and tossing it down into the ditch below. The man followed, his yelp of surprise silenced when he hit the smooth slate of the canal's floor with an agonizing crunch.

Almost falling backwards down the bluff, Ganondorf heaved himself up with his good arm, dislodging the loose soil at the top and sending it showering down. To his surprise, he heard a wince below, and amazingly only a few seconds after him, Zelda's pale wrist surfaced over the hill of the dike, waving for a handhold until she hooked her elbow and torn sleeves onto the edge. Ganondorf watched her pull up and over, scrambling with dirty fingernails. The fallen archer's bow knocked about her neck; she had hastily slung it over a shoulder and when she was kneeling in the dry crab grass she removed it just as hastily. Ganondorf watched with thin interest as she pursed her lips and ran her fingers down the bowstring, as if the dirty thing was an heirloom to be treated with a gentle touch.

"There," Ganondorf said, gesturing further down the canal's length. He could see her eyes dart across, from their vantage point to a large boulder mired in the gravelly waterbed, and sheltering in its shadow, a rider and escort.

"Thieves must come in pairs or threes," she agreed. "Do you suppose their friend here meant to drive us into their trap?"

"I do not suppose," Ganondorf said sharply. "I know. Do not move from this spot; I will crush them quickly enough."

Zelda's small hand was so bold as to touch his elbow. "Wait," she pleaded.

"You know well there is no room for weak mercy here," scolded Ganondorf.

She swallowed a large lump in her throat; Ganondorf could see her choke upon it, sighing deeply in discomfort. "Then please let me make it quick," She said evenly. "They are my people, even to execute."

"Such pedantry has never stopped your kind before," Ganondorf said harshly. "Do as you foolishly will."

Without another word, Zelda drew a speckle-fletched arrow from their victim's discarded quiver where it sat propped against stubborn, bulbous tree. The bow in her hands was not sized for her, and was too long for her grasp, but she managed. Ganondorf's eyes measured her movements: her hesitant hands somehow steady, the tight draw of the bow smooth and fluid. The tension between her arms was invisible as she aimed, and her aim- her eyes were the arrow. Ganondorf could, from their line, trace the path of her shot through the dead, windless air. It was a tangent that traversed: fate etched into a man's skull.

Ganondorf did not see her fire. At the spot she had outlined with her eyes, a perfect center, the arrow seemed to sprout as if by terrible so much as a cry of surprise, the man fell from his horse, which shied and screamed, dragging the corpse by its dead ankle in the stirrups. Ganondorf watched Zelda as she drew the second arrow, this time for the accompanying footman. The change in aim was effortless: when she released, all at once both of them were quite alone once more. She lowered the bow, and lowered her head, but did not speak so much as a prayer for those she had killed.

"Well shot," He conceded bluntly, though he forcefully snatched the bow from her. "You have proven that you are too dangerous to be trusted with this."

"I did shoot you once," she admitted.

"It was not half as good a shot as these here," Ganondorf criticized. "If it was, I would be dead."

Ganondorf could see her hands begin to shake once more. She did not fear bandits, he concluded, but she did rightly fear the King of Evil. Enough, perhaps, that her aim had strayed too far. Ganondorf had once cursed that taunting book of children's tales, long ago in his tower prison. But now, he realized, her spare knowledge and utter fear of him had likely saved his life. If only she had known more, the depths of what I am, and what I could do to her, and to her wretched country, then she wouldn't have stood her ground and fired upon him at all, but would have instead turned and fled into the hills.

"Enough, and follow," he said, climbing down the bank once more. "Your cowardice is beginning to irritate me. I have encountered bolder children of your lineage."

Ignoring her for the time being, he set foot on stable ground once more, and immediately began stripping the hapless thieves of their valuables. Their purses were light, but between the two men and the other in the gorge, they had seven red glass rupees, several more blue, and a handful of nearly-worthless green pieces. Their belts and jackets were of poor make, but they did have a small chest of seized goods tucked behind their bolder. Unfortunately, all that was within was women's clothing and a spool of soft copper wire. Ganondorf lifted the plain linen garments out, meaning to give them to Zelda, and render her at least a little less conspicuous.

She was preoccupied with the rider's horse and unhooking the dead man from the stirrups. Once free, the creature returned to the ordinary placidness expected of a horse' fickle in character, it was concerned only with immediate safety, and the availability of grass. Even to Ganondorf it was large, and ungainly: made of pillar-like legs tottering above roughly-shod plate hooves. In a kinder life, it would have been a plodding grey carthorse. Zelda's eyes were level with its massive withers, though it was somewhat more than scrawny from poor care and feeding and badly composed in features besides.

Ganondorf moved to catch it. The beast shied in terror, white-ringed eyes regarding him suspiciously. Zelda held it tight, though it did not bolt. "It doesn't like you," she said, though her point was overly-clear.

"Take heart, beast," Ganondorf said, scowling as he pocketed the bandits' rations. "I will not have to eat you tonight."

"Shall I set it free?" Zelda said, stroking its dirty coat in pity.

"Keep it," Ganondorf grumbled. "Your legs hardly can keep pace with mine."

With that, he seized her with his good arm, and before she seemed to understand what had happened he had draped her into the saddle and grasped the uncomfortable beast's reins in hand. Without further conversation, he began leading the once-queen and her poor steed, west once more.

—

Zelda was thrown forward onto the horse's neck as Ganondorf led her down a steep bank, sliding in a thick layer of black powder soil. The footing was poor, he thought, and would do well in hindering other, less bold riders. Ganondorf could no longer hear the sharp rapping of iron-shod hooves on the uneven cobbles of the road: a sharp sound in the early morning in this place. It was uncanny, he thought. Familiar bluffs rose out of the western field in the distance, yet the grit and dry air of the desert had crept forward, this time the withering heat emanating from the north and the wastelands. A rank, burnt smell floated in the air, as if the hot wind cooked something rancid as it blew. The dualism of silt and the reek of muck, yet mummified, was utterly unfamiliar in lands he once had called the gate to his domain.

"Please tell me," said Zelda, quite suddenly. "I must know for certain what happened."

Ganondorf would not deign to answer her for many long minutes. The wind blew in their faces as they plodded along, chewing their lips until Zelda was forced to take another measured sip from her glass canteen. It was in that pause that Ganondorf finally decided, against his better judgement, to entertain her.

"Your hold broke over me when Calas claimed your throne. You yourself upon the throne of Hyrule: those were your terms, and you stated them to me clearly. I set to kill him, when you no longer impeded me," Ganondorf said slowly. "He met me with your damned Master Sword and the force of your ancestors warding against my magic. Those factors, added to my... present handicap, I have not yet succeeded in my endeavors."

"Plainly."

Even mounted upon a tall horse, Ganondorf only had to lift his chin to meet her eyes and silently reprimand her for the remark. "Tell me how the worm is able to wield the Master Sword," Ganondorf demanded. "It does not belong in his grasp."

"The Lord of Springspass and I, we are... closely related," Zelda said, gripping the cracked saddle horn with scabbed fingers. "We share the same blood. Under Providence of the Gods, the Royal Family of Hyrule has always been able to move the Master Sword. I do not know if Calas can command its true powers, but it can be his to at least hold in his hands."

Ganondorf grinned bitterly. Any man would have said it was less a smile and more the bared teeth of a vengeful beast. "It stings just the same as ever."

"Excuse me, but what is _that_?"

Ganondorf opened his mouth to berate her on how in all hells she could possibly not know that the Master Sword was painful when he looked forward to see that behind him, an enormous billowing wall had appeared from the north. In a way, it almost seemed alive: an ooze over the landscape. The jagged rises of cliffs and the pinpricks of trees vanished inside it, swallowed by swirling haze. "A dust storm," Ganondorf identified, in his mind quite suddenly young again, flashing through visions of crawling into a shuttered fortress, a hard lesson learned. "We will seek higher ground."

With some coaxing, Ganondorf managed a reluctant trot out of the bony horse. "But the crossing is south of here," Zelda said, eyes growing wide. "Where will we go?"

"I will manage," grunted Ganondorf as he jogged alongside the horse. His muscles burned: a long march on little food had exhausted his strength, and will was all that urged him on now. But, he reminded himself, he was not a man to be defeated by a little dust and an empty stomach. It disturbed him enough that the desert was leaking, spidering out of the wastelands and into what had once been lush farmlands. Once, he had looked upon the fields with envy and scorn, cursing who had decided that he would inherit a cursed pit of sand and that others would lead easier lives. That the someone could possibly change their mind had never occurred to him.

The canyon's far wall drew near, and Ganondorf led the now-frantic horse over the divide from dry dirt to cracked clay and rock. He was close now, he knew, though while the cliffs and hills matched his memory perfectly, the reek in the air had grown nearly unbearable. The first wisps of dust had come, the air darkened with a brown haze. Cursing, Ganondorf felt his boots meet shallow water, and after a moment dazed wondering _what possibly could have happened to the giant ravine_he realized that he was standing in it: the river trickling so dry atop a mountain of deposited stones. Dimly, he could see the sluggish flow spill into the desert, rerouted by the strange filled-land dam.

Nearly too late, Ganondorf arrived at his goal, though to his amazement he found that the bottom level of the ancient Gerudo fortress had been submerged. The horse splashed awkwardly up the hill, scaling crumbled shoulders that had once been impassable rooftops. In the shadow of the highest ruin they could find, they took shelter. Even there, the stone had been licked bare and feeble by wind and time. The ceiling was nearly gone, and the floor collapsed. Ceiling sat on top of falling ceiling: they hid in a solid stone crater sunken into the red rock wall.

This was no longer any sort of home, Ganondorf knew. Nothing remained. Quickly, he unknotted Zelda's ruined gown from where she'd tied it around the horse's saddle rings. She'd been all-too-eager to change, even with the King of Evil watching her every move.

Ganondorf purposely had forgotten the sight. It was not one he needed at the moment. He tore the rich, thick fabric into rags, between his teeth and good hand. "Dismount," he ordered, in between his teeth. "Keep the horse quiet."

Then he tied the cloth about its nose, and a second rag about its eyes, until its face looked like a piece of furniture in a cellar. Then he roughly did the same to Zelda, her confused wail of no concern to him, nor her prying, weak fingers.

"What is this? Are you trying to smother me?"

The dust hit. Ganondorf was forced to shut his eyes as he managed his own, and until he'd pulled the knot tight with his teeth he choked his own breath to a halt. Vaguely, he could feel Zelda press against him, sheltering between his shadow and that of the horse. Their cover was poor, and while the dust was most vicious over the valley floor, their hole in the cliff was only marginally better. The stinging winds buffeted him, but like an iron anchor Ganondorf was unflinching, unmoving against the assault.

Though it was days-dried, Ganondorf could smell Zelda's blood through the fabric. At least that was the same, he thought, in this unthinkable situation. It was a sweet iron scent, and mesmerizing to the senses. Ganondorf could not remember all of his many lifetimes, but in each he had sampled this macabre perfume.

He wondered if she knew— if she was aware that even as she had no choice but to cling to his promise of protection and shelter, he fantasized about all the ways he had killed her before, and every instance that he had savored it.

This moment at the present, he thought, was not one those past lives could have imagined.

The storm's wake was that of hot, dry air, and the choking cloud pushed past them so quickly that emerging was almost like coming up from a long dive in water. Zelda coughed violently, tearing the cloth from her face. Her long, coppery hair was dulled beyond recognition, caked with filth, and her cracked fingernails took a gritty, ruddy stain. Immediately she set to calming the frantic, wheezing horse.

Ganondorf looked back at the storm's path, and saw it bite into Hyrule, the desert claiming a few more miles from his ancient ambition.

—

Their troubles soon went from too dry of footing, to too wet of footing. Ganondorf by far had the worst of it, and had actually shed his breastplate and pauldrons to eliminate their weight, but it hadn't helped. Dunes and water combined created a very poor, hellish sort of brack swamp: a mire of misery and quicksand that ground their progress to a halt. There were no roads; every so often Ganondorf had to heave his legs out of the muck with such force he was sure he would eventually leave a boot behind.

He scowled at Zelda, who curled her feet atop the horse and did not dip so much as a toe in the mud. But, grudgingly, he gave her the allowance. What terrible pace would they make with her dragging her dress through the sludge?

Zelda smacked a mosquito on herself with surprising malice, the slap of her palm sharp against the dull hum of the evening wildlife. Ganondorf could not fathom what possibly could live here. It was a hilarious irony: so many days he had once wished the river would rise and carry its silt to his desert, to moisten it at least a little. This mess was hardly what he had in mind. Few weeds grew up out of the still, rancid waters, and he could not imagine what the insects ate to survive.

Each other. He slapped a biting fly off himself, and conceded he was on their menu. Next to him, the horse swatted wildly with its threadbare tail, straining against the sucking mud.

The setting sun blinded them; on the mirror waters the reflection was too much, and they proceeded with closed, squinting eyes. A mosaic of dots danced on the water's surface: tiny oarbugs, They vanished with the dusk, and with a firey crecendo the sun dove behind the horizon. Ganondorf looked upon the sky's glory, and no matter how strange and changed the wastelands had become, the painted red stain of the sky was made fresh in his memory. He was not sure when he had forgotten it.

But curiously, and to his surprise, in the distance candles and hearths twinkled into existence. This strange, impossible settlement baffled and beckoned to him, and even if he would mock his own sentiment, he yearned at the moment for nothing more than dry ground.

"I don't believe it," Zelda said, and in her tone Ganondorf heard a ghost. "We lost only one settlement, in all of these years. The Zora's first and greatest attack, when they dammed the river and flooded the dunes... no one was left alive. They couldn't have survived. This land isn't Hyrule anymore. I would have heard. They would have sent word to us that they survived."

"Don't be foolish," Ganondorf said. "People will live in the least-loved of places, if that is where you force them to."

Zelda stared into the tiny, forlorn lights. Ganondorf wondered what she was thinking. Surely she realized, it was she, her line, that had done this.

"Nothing changes," he said. "Even after all this time, Hyrule still exiles its thieves."


	11. 10

After miles slogging through the swamp, Ganondorf very nearly hauled the horse that carried Zelda onto a hidden dirt track. Their crossing over the dammed river had been perhaps the worst possible; behind the dam, Ganondorf supposed this unofficial highway wicked off from the dry riverbed. Like a vein, it snaked across the distance and fed into a distant beating heart: a town shaded against the dawn by a haze of smoke.

The town itself piled high; everything lived on top of itself. Every fortunate mud brick building had an array of wooden and reed lean-tos sprouting from it, people crowding for places to live. There was no transition between the paths through the swamp and hard-beaten dirt capillaries through the settlement. So worn from shuffling feet, in places red sandstone peeked through a crust of ash, refuse, and compressed dust. This area, Ganondorf thought, likely had once been a mesa breaking through a dune sea, before mud and sluice had leveled the land. The silt was ruined: too wet, too mixed with sand, for any useful farming.

Onions. Ganondorf distinguished the reek from every other damned reek as he led the overwhelmed horse through the narrow streets. The desert could now grow weeds and onions. He supposed that was an improvement over nothing at all. The stench mixed with that of acrid smoke, belching from burning bundles of weeds. It kept away the insects, but was similarly repulsive to people. Ganondorf could hear Zelda retch softly as they passed one a little too closely.

"We need food," Zelda said quietly, leaning forward, wrapping her arms around the horse's sweaty neck. "And rest. I'm not sure I can stay awake for any longer."

"You will rest when safe," Ganondorf said sharply. "And these streets are not."

The few shopfronts they passed that seemed reputable provided necessities. Even thieves needed clothes, shelter, and bread. Among few that seemed prosperous were an escort house and a brewery. Covertly, Ganondorf slipped a few day-old buns from those set outside for sale. Oblivious in her exhaustion, Zelda's sleepy eyes closed. "You don't even know where we are," she said, twining her fingers into the dirty horse's mane. "I don't even know where we are."

"Hyrule's laws reach now to every known crevasse and hole in the land," said Ganondorf. "I see no reason why its apostates and exiles would not make a new slum of their own."

"We do not have slums," Zelda muttered.

"Your army is your slum," Ganondorf retorted. "And we walk among those unfit to serve. Not even I would not linger here."

Unexpectedly, inspired by some unknown corner of her exhausted mind Zelda's voice rose in triumph, unnoticed among the dull murmur of the town's business. "And where will you go instead, Evil One? Where could you possibly take me, and what then would you do?"

Ganondorf scowled at her, only to find her eyes had opened where she rested: lion-fierce once again without need of binding curse or authority of throne. Her hope was a bitter, acrid one. Ganondorf tugged the horse's reins tighter, causing the animal's mouth to pinch. "I will keep you for the rest of your miserable, wretched life. May you watch your kingdom burn, before the end, and I will consume the ashes."

"It doesn't much matter what happens to me," said Zelda, her voice a terrible rime upon Ganondorf's ears. "I have served my purpose in this life; you will not rise again, I think."

"Enough!"

Ganondorf's order was loud enough to elicit slammed shutters from nearly two house-lengths in radius. Zelda's face nearly matched her icy scars, lips pursing in speechless protest.

"Eat and be silent," he said, and shoved the hard crust in her hand. "You have made your point. This town will be a refuge, for now."

Ganondorf tore at his own bread, ripping a hard bite with canine teeth. Immediately he recognized the tell-tale grit of chalk, baked in with an unfamiliar root starch. It was a marvel they managed bread at all, considering the marshlands and sandgrass moors extending for miles in nearly every direction. The poor meal didn't go far enough, it did not fill his stomach, but it took the edge off enough to think.

They were in the town's central square now, so far as Ganondorf could tell. A mere bare space did not a market center make: peddlers pushed themselves into every corner possible. Their ill-gotten wares and ramshackle displays pinched the village way into almost a footpath.

What mattered, however, was not the close quarters, but the high visibility of the area. There was a sort of cowardly pact in public places, Ganondorf knew, that any upset to the area would disrupt their shared habitat. They stared, however covertly, at Ganondorf and Zelda's arrival, already scanning the potential for profit. Ganondorf could see their crowish eyes darken when they saw none, or he assumed they saw none. They predictably began assessing him as such an upset to their mutual home.

This suited Ganondorf just fine. Their cowardly, dread-filled leers were familiar enough; they knew better than to provoke a giant in public, just as they knew better than to trust a man in private. Swallowing the last of his roll of bread (choking down a rock?) Ganondorf spied a row of hitching rings in front of what was plain a well-frequented inn. With little warning to Zelda, Ganondorf threw his stolen horse's reigns over its dusty neck as it tiredly stumbled to a halt.

"Is this where we stop?"

Ganondorf did not bother to reply; the answer was obvious to him and that she had to ask seemed like almost a parody of her supposed wisdom. In a single smooth motion, Ganondorf hooked his good, left arm around her and pulled Zelda from the stirrups, setting her down struggling on the dirt. She stumbled, saddle-sore, but did not run or cry out. It took a second to notice that she had briefly choked on the remains of her crust of bread. Ganondorf took their bundle of 'valuables' where it had been tied to the horse's tack with rags, and tucked it under his bad arm. Nothing loose of worth left behind, he grasped their beast's leathers and turned to Zelda sharply.

"Tie the horse," he commanded.

Zelda looked at him, then at the reins Ganondorf shoved at her, blinking in confusion. Was this somehow difficult for her to grasp? Juggling his bundle, Ganondorf held up both his hands: his whole left, and his missing metal-capped right stump. Zelda swallowed the dust in her throat and took the horse from Ganondorf. She quickly looped the reins into the hitching ring. Her knot was crisp and impeccable; she even tested it's quick-release before it satisfied her.

"Good. Now come. Walk before me."

With his great hand on her shoulder, Ganondorf pushed Zelda to the door. Like all the construction they had seen, it was a strange, foreign affair: woven as a triple-thick layer of wicker, creaking as Zelda pushed it inward. A layer of evil-smelling smoke glazed the inside, wisping from thick candles that provided the only light. A few boarders sat at rough-hewn tables, drinking their distilled spirits, likely in an effort to cure their own despondent spirits. Upon closer inspection, the building obviously had once been a garrison in some more fortunate time. Yet the only soldiers it housed now were soldiers of misfortune.

"One room," Ganondorf demanded.

"We have none you can afford," replied the boarding-master, who kept a tatty, overfilled book at the far end of the mud-brick housing. The man flinched, though stood firm; from the mess of characters foundering apathetic in the main hall, he likely had seen his share of monstrous men in his lifetime. Ganondorf momentarily wished he engaoled an ogre, and not a ruined princess.

No, Ganondorf merely had to redouble his efforts. He could feel his scowl deepen, and his grimace bite into the man's face. A quiet, choked mumble escaped the boarding-master's throat: like a wounded calf.

"We have only this," said Zelda quietly, cutting into Ganondorf's intimidation. She pushed a single cobalt-stained rupee piece across the pitted pine countertop. Ganondorf could see the man's eyes darken. What in all the hells was she doing? Why lie about their prospects, if it would discourage the man? Second to his own life, the man was concerned with money, after all...

"Be silent," Ganondorf growled at Zelda.

She ignored him. "Well, I suppose we could spare a little more."

A green rupee. The boarding-master grit his teeth, unconvinced.

Ganondorf shook her. "Be silent!"

"Oh, you are a cruel man, innkeep," Zelda simpered, dismissing her captor, though Ganondorf was puzzled to hear her theatrical tone. She slid a single red twenty-rupee piece over the wood. "A true burglar."

A wide smile cracked the man's face, though his eyes still fixed upon Ganondorf. "Deal. Two days, dawn to dusk, twenty rupees. You want more, match that rate."

"Second on the right upstairs. Mind the mites"

Ganondorf snatched the key up, turned it over in his hand, and then pressed it into Zelda's grasp in irritation. She gasped in confusion as he forced her stumbling feet up the creaking plank stairs, to the door. But the purpose was soon clear: Ganondorf could not push her along and handle the door at the same time.

"Open it."

Zelda scraped the key in the dim lighting, and after a few dull metal-on-latch clinks she managed to fit it into the lock. It took both of her hands to turn the key. The door jumped open so abruptly she almost fell inside, onto bare, rough lumber flooring. Within the narrow, room was a single, small, straw-stuffed bed, and a large wicker chair. A small table held a lonely, thick candle, and the window was high, barred, and at the moment shuttered. on the far wall, a clay basin was bolted in place, full of stale water. A fogged, rust-freckled steel mirror, from nails that ought to have belonged to a ceiling was so low Ganondorf would have had to stoop, if he wished to stand.

"You will not move from this room," Ganondorf commanded, pushing her inside. He pocketed her key, and threw the bundle of gown-rags, empty glass, and scant supplies in after her. He kept the bow, their collective wallet of rupees, and his sword for himself.

"Under threat of pain?" inquired Zelda, voice far too dry for Ganondorf's liking.

Ganondorf shut the door and locked it behind him. "May you never find out."

—

It did not take long to find the local horse-seller. Partially due, Ganondorf regretted, to a wretch deciding to steal his horse. While he would have written it off as a loss (such a thin beast could never have held him anyway, for all its height) he knew its value. Even a wanted man would pay handsomely for any form of passage or transport at all, much less a horse with its own tack.

The hapless thief was aware of these facts as well, and probably took the knowledge to his grave. As for Ganondorf, he managed to find a bristle brush to sweep the dust off of the horse's back, and he cleaned the sweat-stains away from under the creature's saddle. There was no point in offering sullied goods.

Tiresome diversions aside, Ganondorf managed to reach the stable: the only one in the settlement. it was on the outskirts and little more than a barn patched with mud daube; the walls themselves had more horsehair in their make than the horses within had hair to spare. Inside, dusty light filtered through stretched-rag windows. A few desultory beasts swayed quietly within: scraping around in the dried weeds of their stalls. Some simply stood around in equine serenity, their tiredness betrayed only by the hair and skin rubbed bare from boredom-weaving stall doors. A single aging stablehand regarded Ganondorf in disinterest, merely continuing to shovel muck into his sledge.

"I mean to sell this horse," Ganondorf said. He no longer needed it, and was in need of rupees far more than he was of emaciated animal.

The worker ignored him, more interested in the muck. Ganondorf looped the horse's reins over its neck, and it stood still, apathetic while Ganondorf lifted the offending stablehand off the ground with his one good arm. Shaking the unfortunate bald man by the collar, Ganondorf reiterated, "Call your master. I wish to do business with him."

"Yes! Yes! I will get him! Please!"

Always the same. Ganondorf let the man go, and watched him flee to a hovel outside the barn. For a moment, he was almost thankful for Zelda providing him a unique challenge in this lifetime; in all others, a show of force, a push, was all it took to move the denizens of Hyrule. As Ganondorf stood there, with the lean horse, he felt old. For so long he had tried to destroy the world that produced such tiresome, cowardly men, and yet here beyond the bounds of Hyrule that world persisted. For such a weak thing, he thought, it was awfully tenacious.

The stable-master that emerged from the hovel, and entered the barn, hardly looked any better-off than his servant: aged, rotund, and bent like a windblown tree. Red sunburns stained his skin, and peeled over his heavily callused hands, one of which gripped a thick switch as a cane, though he possessed no limp to speak of. The stablehand pointed his employer in the correct direction, and then scurried away presumably in fright.

"Thank you, Ingo. Customer?"

Curiously, the man hardly looked at Ganondorf, instead staring impassively at the horse as it pawed the floor in impatience. "I wish to sell this animal," Ganondorf said. "For a good price."

"We will see about that, young man," said the stable master, finally craning up at Ganondorf. His squint was profound, with slit eyes. Without comment, the man hobbled over to the horse and began to run down its shoulders with the palms of his hands. He frowned as he met the cracked leather tack, but soon set to inspecting it thoroughly: testing the tightness of the girth, the length of the stirrups.

"You did not ride this horse," the man said in interest. "You are far too tall for these leathers. How did you come by this animal?"

Ganondorf decided to answer honestly; there was nothing to be lost by being so petty as to bother with some old man. "Highwaymen were so foolish as to challenge me, and their horse was the least of what they lost."

"Then you did them a great mercy," said the stable-master. "This animal does not belong to them, and they would have suffered far greater pain than death had my own master exacted his fee. I do not forget a horse, you see, and a month ago, this unfortunate prize vanished from a stall."

The man continued to chatter. Ganondorf's impatience would have none of it. "Tell me your price, old man, and be done with this."

"It is not yours to sell," said the man. "But fortunately for you, I have the bounty for the thieves, and it is of greater value than this poor creature."

"Then give it to me, and I will be off."

The stable master paused, hands halting over the horse's hide. "In truth, I wish to make an offer to you, foreigner," he said. "If you are willing to glean more rupees out of me, for you seem eager."

Ganondorf first opened his mouth to decline, but then thought of the inn's rate. He thought about how long he could possibly support even such a reasonable price, one that he began to suspect Zelda had won. He even found himself regretting that he had not brought her here, if she had a talent for extracting rupees from gullible fools.

"This horse was treated poorly, in the time away from here, and clearly you traveled far with it," said the man. "And yet, before you meant to sell it to me, you brushed it clean, refitted its tack, and saw to its sores. I do not know if you traveled with a child or a woman, from the length of the stirrup leathers, but you graciously adjusted them and instead walked alongside for the journey."

Ganondorf froze, not entirely sure what the stable-master was insinuating.

"For all of your ferocity to bandits, you treat what is yours well, and your skill with horses is certainly apparent," said the stable-master. "You clearly are recent, and better you find work here, than with my own master."

"I am flattered," said Ganondorf, not flattered at all, "but I have only one hand with which to work, so I must decline."

Quietly, the stable-master began to laugh, and shuffled over to Ganondorf to take the creature's reins. "Exactly how is that a hinderance?" he asked, opening his eyes to reveal that both of them were blown from glass.

—

When Ganondorf returned to the inn, he found a substantial line curling inside, up to the rented rooms. He tore up the creaking stairs, and those in queue scattered like starlings, parted by his great bulk. To his confusion, they fled holding all manner of garments: from coats, to trousers, to underthings: some of them mismatched and unlikely.

Ganondorf's first thoughts concerned Zelda; what could she possibly have done to attract such a crowd, and had she left the room and escaped? But how did those two things coincide, and why in Din's name were there so many men bringing to his room their underthings?

Finally he reached the door to their room, and found Zelda inside, seated on the large wicker chair. In her lap she held some hapless urchin's pants, and in her hands a needle and thread. The boy went absolutely pale as he saw Ganondorf fill up the room, but Zelda hushed him. "I'm nearly done," she said. "Don't mind him."

She pulled a line of stitches together so quickly that even Ganondorf was not sure if he had blinked, tied a tiny knot, and presented the mended garment to the boy. He pressed a blue rupee into her hands and fled as if the room was a nest of tektites. Zelda tucked the rupee into a small sack fashioned from part of her old sleeve. The sharp hexagonal end poked out of the full purse.

"What have you done?" Ganondorf snarled, shutting the door firmly. His head brushed the ceiling uncomfortably; he was sure he would get a knot in his neck from bending for too long. "I told you to stay in this room."

"I did," Zelda said defensively. "My old gown still had a needle in it, and I offered to patch for the maid when she came. Her word spread."

She lifted the full purse and spilled it onto the counter, full of green, blue, and even a few yellow rupees. After sticking her well-used needle into the collar of her dress, she leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms.

"Well? Are you going to beat me yet?" she asked, biting her lip. "You have thrown me from a window, stolen me from my city and all I have ever known, to drag me across a wasteland. But I refuse to be reduced to baggage on your account."

There were so many impulses to follow, for Ganondorf. So many responses. Every one of them conflicted, every one of them contradicted, and none were compatible with his plans thus far... which themselves were poor. Attain Zelda. Find secure place. Somehow use her to find her missing share of the Triforce as well as ultimately his own. But how to get past the second step, he had no idea.

And there she was, terrified of him, yet so bold in spite of that he could almost...

Ganondorf laughed. She stared, baffled, but he paid her no heed. This. This facet of Zeldas, this was what always ended his rule. Not the cold disdain he endured in his brief servitude, not the paralyzed fear he had seen in their flight from Hyrule. Here, laid out so simply, was the look she always gave him before his defeat: so small and so mortal and so undefeated by her fear. All over mending some poor fools' shirts. All against the will of a Dark Lord of nothing at all.

And yet, she had no idea. Ganondorf laughed, and it felt good to; he suspected it had been several lifetimes since the last earnest laugh, and he felt the cobwebs choke out of his chest. He was not sure when he had forgotten the rush of sanguine giddiness that came with true laughter, the catharsis. It was times like this that Ganondorf was not sure if the benefits of godhood outweighed the detriments.

"Not a bad haul," he said despite himself, and swept the rupees from the small purse into their larger wallet. "Perhaps it will buy a small reward for you."

"You can't train me like a dog," Zelda said, her words echoing some of his own. Ganondorf only split a wide, hungry smile.

"I am glad we agree," he said. "But know that your great will and act of rebellion led you to mend socks, and mine led me to rend a kingdom."

She held up a patched cloth, and tossed it at him. Ganondorf recognized it as his cape, which had long torn in their escape and been a poor blanket and sun-shade for them on the road. "I think my project came out better," she said. "No one can usurp socks."

"This is merely a setback," Ganondorf spat angrily. "I will kill your King."

Zelda, for the first time met him eye-to-eye. The contact was startling, and in pure, baffled wonder, he saw the same piercing look that had greeted his death in so many iterations, but this time in no opposition. If Ganondorf had not known better, he would have identified it as conspiracy.

"I too am glad that we agree," said Zelda.

—

Sleeping in the wicker chair could not merely be described as uncomfortable. Ganondorf, experienced with nearly every torment a man could ever conceive to inflict upon another, who had exacted nearly the same number of tortures on his enemies, found he could not wish the discomfort of terrible itchy straws on any other man. The sharp reeds stuck into him where the weave was poor, and the rest of them scratched his neck. It was not made for a man his size, and his knees drew up and his legs prickled with pins and needles.

For this reason, Ganondorf found himself awoken sometime during the first night by a stabbing in his back. Grumbling, he massaged it, only to flatten a few stems of straw where they'd poked out of the wicker. It was too late to go back to sleep, unfortunately; he'd discovered the moon's rays cast through shutter slats aligned perfectly over his face. And his muscles were sore. And his skin felt clammy. As if all the planets had aligned for some discomforting ritual, Ganondorf found his rest ruined.

Groggily, he opened his eyes, hoping that he would become tired enough to drift off once more. A dark shadow moved in the room, before the mirror. Suddenly awake, Ganondorf moved to draw his sword from where he had leaned it against the chair. His useless stub raked through space, and Ganondorf realized it was useless to try with his left hand, anyway; the sword had fallen to the floor and out of reach. Ganondorf soon recognized the silhouette as Zelda: stark as a statue, and silent as a dead woman. He could hardly hear her breathe.

Her back was turned, but in the mirror's reflection he could see her fingers touch her face, run down her arms: mystified. Her expression was indescribable.

She was counting the scars left upon her: an injury inflicted by Ganondorf, one he should have taken pride in but hardly noticed. After all, she and her line had maimed, imprisoned, and even enslaved him, to say nothing of all the times he had found himself dead by their hands.

And yet, she was not him, he knew, and for every time he had once lost she had been the victor. She knew little of loss, knew little of exile, and certainly in this particular lifetime she knew little of defeat.

Perhaps, he thought, she knew too little of herself now, that she stood before a mirror, stripped of every promise she once held. Of land, of title, of birth and nobility. Of repute. Of beauty. Ganondorf knew what she felt, what it was like to experience death. He knew how to persist on the boundary between life and ruin, in a purgatory. One that, and his skin crawled, they had both designed together. He by hubris. She by inaction.

Ganondorf closed his eyes again, hoping the solace of the dark room would take him. He had confronted death many times, but this time he had been awake to experience it, still living to see every accomplishment and prospect evaporate and amount to nothing. It was a new, cruel end to a life that he hadn't even suspected could exist: one that left a man still breathing.

It presented a problem. One that the Gods or the efforts of his loyal thralls had always seemed fit to solve for him, and one he had never had solved for himself.

Exactly what could a man do, he thought, to rise from the dead?

11—


	12. 11

Thread. It was everywhere. Ganondorf could hardly believe the amount of work even the wretched exiles of the remote settlement could conjure up. Ganondorf found folded commissions, extra fabric, piles of scraps, and pilfered spools of thread on nearly every possible surface of the crowded room. It was a wanton, tangling mass; in the center, like a spider amidst cobwebs, sat Zelda.

"Please, do you have anything to do?" she asked, eyes flitting from stitch to stitch. "It's hard to work with you leering at me."

Ganondorf sat in the scratchy chair, surrounded at every vector by unfinished garments in queue. "In my experience, you are troublesome as a prisoner," he said, "and I will not leave you to your own devices."

"Maybe you are my prisoner?" Zelda said. "You cannot leave me, it seems, and you would not be able to persist here if not for my earnings."

Zelda cut her thread, knotted it, and shook out the jacket she had mended. Ganondorf scoffed at her where she sat.

"In my power, you are my prisoner," Ganondorf said. "I have taken everything from you; you have lost far more than me."

"Both you and I know that is not true."

She didn't understand. She could never understand; any pretensions from her were loathsome.

"You and I, we have for centuries been pulling each other down," Zelda said, reaching for the next piece of work. "My ancestors finally managed to throw you into a ditch, and now you have reached up to grab my ankle, and pulled me into the mud with you."

Ganondorf racked his brain to think of something, anything to stop her. It been so simple for her, hadn't it, with the ability to silence him with a single command? Ganondorf had no such luxury; he recalled exactly why in the past he had locked her in sleep or paralysis, or bound her. Or gagged her. Or cut out her tongue. Soldiers and kingdoms were easy to conquer. Free mouths less so. Instead, he did his best to ignore; he should have known that his attempt would fall instantly to his own greed for conflict.

"You may boast about how much you have taken from me, but I don't exactly see you holding the spoils," she said. "Your threats are those of a filthy exile feigning lordship over another filthy exile."

Ganondorf's stare could blister the mirror on the back wall, but to his annoyance he found the woman's flinch was gone, replaced with a cold despair that felt so distinctly wrong to him that he wanted to command her, 'be Zelda!' With hysterical bitterness, he found an opponent in himself: he had longed, ached for the day that Zelda's spirit finally would be broken. He had tried for so long and with such ferocity, and yet when the day came, he wasn't the victor. And now he resented it, quite suddenly.

He hardly craved familiarity, but Zelda as a constant foe was perhaps the only landmark he could recognize through his ages spent upon the earth. He found he did not appreciate the snuffing of that beacon light as much as he had thought he would.

There was no way to communicate any of this to her. And so he struck her where she sat, without a word. She cried out, knocked to the bed's surface, reeling in the stained sheets. Her spools of thread scattered, order transformed into tangles. Ganondorf's knuckles stung, a familiar pain mirroring the unfamiliar bruise spreading across Zelda's right cheek. She was fragile, he realized. For all her status as his eternal foe, for all that he had paranoia for his own mortality, her life was far more delicate than his own.

"This is no worse than what Calas would do to me, had he caught me. What bandits, bounty hunters, or anyone in this pit would do to me should they learn of me... I do not expect any less." Zelda said, licking the blood from her split lip. "I am ready to suffer."

"Enough!" A single, hawkish blue eye peeked out from under her mess of brassy hair. Ganondorf supposed he had her babbling attention. "You disgust me," he said. "Your ancestors fought for generations to defeat me, slaughtered until my sword bathed red in their blood for eight hundred years, and before that into ages past. And yet, for every damned time you have prevailed over me, this is all you have to say for yourself when forced to suffer a single defeat? That you are content in your punishment?"

She was still enough to have died. Good riddance, he thought.

"Perhaps I do not need to watch you after all," he spat, "If you are so eager to stay in your cage."

He was at the door, and she was still frozen where she lay, reeling.

"I am not so content, Zelda."

He shut the door on her, feeling the bang of an army drum abusing the inside of his skull. Even so, he did not forget to lock the door behind him as he swept off in search of more worthwhile tasks.

She may have wallowed in her own sorrows, he thought, but she still was a Zelda, and mere emotions had never stopped one before.

—

The correct answer for all of this mess, Ganondorf knew, was to decide on where to go next, and what to do there. The proper way to decide on these things, Ganondorf also knew, was over several pints of ale and with no interruptions. The only problem with this was the wallet with whatever he and Zelda had between them remained securely in their room, and that was a place that Ganondorf had no wish to face again any time soon.

Leaving had been unwise, he admitted, but he had done so many unwise things in his lifetime It was beginning to get tiresome, actually. But similarly, there was no way to sit himself down and bother about it all without said pints of ale.

He could steal the money, he admitted to himself, and it would be easy. Even something as unsophisticated as taking a fool behind an alley and beating them to death for spare rupees could go unnoticed. However, the chance that the target could belong to some brotherhood or part of a smuggler cartel was not one that Ganondorf wanted to deal with; the world was far larger than the politics of this wretched place and he had no ambitions to rule over the depraved and the poor.

He did not exactly have a limited amount of free time, anyway. For that reason, he found himself doing what he had least expected.

Ganondorf unlocked yet another stall door, basket of bristle-bare brushes hooked over his bad elbow. The beast inside snorted in discomfort, never taking his eyes off the man. Yes, he thought. 'Honest' work. How the mighty fall. Carefully, he reached out to the horse with a dull iron curry comb, and began to rub the loose hair from its hide. It tolerated him warily.

The task was boring beyond belief, but at least at the end of the day there would be pay, and it put him somewhere off the streets: somewhere quiet and without the screeching throng of bodies that haggled and crowded his thoughts away. The ash-grey hairs of the animal itched his hands where the already-thin coat was wearing thin. Ganondorf had brought the animal in well enough, but the beast had faced a lifetime of poor care earlier. Every Gerudo had once been taught how to care for their horse; it was a rite of adulthood and an honor to care for one, the steed that would carry them through raids and even to war. Never before had he seen as scant care as in this stable, however; not even in the middle of the desert.

These were not of the ancient and hardy, scrub-eating stock of the desert's history. Liberated from caravans, these were the spoils of highwaymen or riderless orphans stolen from battlefields. Animals of Hyrule's once-lush fields, they did not handle their diets of dried weed-hay, or the bitter crab-grass. There were no oats to fatten them; they persisted as bony creatures, let out once a day to chew at the moorland's meager pasture. Ganondorf moved to the hoof-pick, turning the sharp hook of steel over in his good hand before he realized that with only one arm getting the animal to pick up its feet would be difficult. How mundane a difficulty, he thought. Once, I concerned myself with the workings of divinity and the fall of kingdoms, and now my thoughts are those of a horsegroom. He managed, however, and began excavating cakes of foul-smelling muck.

There was much to do, he thought. This mess was just the same, he told himself, as what he had considered a 'setback' as while imprisoned in the castle. Perhaps it was even an improvement; he was free to go where he pleased, within reason. Yes; from this place, he could move forward; perhaps even to re-establish his army. Surely savage folk and wild beasts still existed in the world, even with Hyrule's dominance so hard-formed. It would then be only the simple task of re-ganging them into his service.

It did not matter what wills any of them could have established in the time he had been gone, thought Ganondorf as he picked the horse's last filthy foot clean. Such thralls were easily shaped to match their masters.

Finished with the animal's hooves, Ganondorf wiped the muck off his good hand on his breeches and stood straight, cracking his back. There was a problem with his plan, however... the question was if his sorcery would behave or not.

Ganondorf looked at the gangly grey. It was the same beast that had borne them into this gods-forsaken settlement, and perhaps it would do to bear them out again. It looked back at him knowingly, pleadingly. Please, its eyes implored: no more. That was impossible, however; it was just a dumb beast. It could hardly protest as Ganondorf invoked the impossible complexity of a spell of domination: passed down from the Twinrova centuries ago... though a few substitutions had to be made. Small, hiccuping power for the usual dark sorcery... but it hardly mattered. It was just a horse; not a thing of mind at all. A test was in order; he stepped out of the stall to make safe the preparations.

The first task was a simple paralysis spell; easy even with a diminished wellspring to draw from. The beast bellowed through raw, flared nostrils, white-rimmed eyes darting in horror. The second step was to impress his suggestion of servitude upon the creature; laughably easy, for a horse had nothing to replace. The third, to bind that contract of obedience to Ganondorf's will in the physical sense; it's very existence could easily be shaped to the master's wishes. Easy, too easy. If this rite had required so little power before, he wondered, why then had he applied so much, so many times in the past?

Ganondorf looked up from his spell at last, to inspect his newest thrall. It was a horse, shrieking and terrified in its stall. It bucked and reared, spooked at the temporary loss of its mobility: unchanged. No horns? Not even a little breath of fire?

Ganondorf's question answered itself. No, he thought. Your sorcery will not behave.

"Commotion?"

The voice had so quickly levitated to his side that Ganondorf almost drew his sword. But it had only been the useless stable-master. While Ganondorf occupied himself with sorcery, the old man had drawn near. Sightless eyes stared blankly at Ganondorf's collarbone. It took a longer, more embarrassing moment than Ganondorf was willing to admit to realize that the man had referred to the horse. Not spellwork that a blind man could never have seen anyway.

"Merely a horsefly," Ganondorf said,

"I see," said the stable owner. "You do good work, boy. Here is your day's pay."

The man held out a single, chipped red rupee. Ganondorf's hand hovered around the gnarled, withered fingers before closing around the wrist, palming the money. Knowing that his payment had not been dropped, the stable-master slipped out of Ganondorf's grasp.

"Any idea what you want to use it for?" the man asked. "Drink? Board?"

Ganondorf thought. "News," he said.

It was a moment before the slow, old man reacted. But that reaction was jovial laughter that shook the man's whole frame. He reared like a snake, unfurling from his hunch, throwing back his head to the thatch roof. "You are smarter than you seem!" he said. "Get yourself down to the Naked Eye, behind the brewhouse. You tell them there that Talon sent you. You'll soon be sorted straight on whatever truth you're looking for."

—

The Naked Eye was one of the larger, well-kept buildings among the settlement's sprawl. Unlike others, its mud daub had few to no cracks spidering up to the roof. The doors were wooden, and wicker. The smoke that hazily twisted out between shutters and from under eaves scented of incense and myrrh, creating a cloud of welcome for a few yards in front of its street front. Amidst the shady shops and the outcast peddlers, the Naked Eye was an establishment of wealth, an establishment with distinction.

Naturally, it was a brothel.

Ganondorf was unsure about the proper etiquette. Houses such as these, he thought, were for those who didn't have the needs of an entire race to attend to. A little too late he remembered it had been countless lifetimes since the Gerudo's population been a concern in his life at all. The men inside took little notice of him; the parlor was busy at work and the escorts did their jobs well; those who paid for simple company were not to be disrupted. But Ganondorf was aware of the eyes. The eyes of the girls flicked, they pointed, they danced subtly from him, to the door, to the serving boy, to each other.

A code, to be sure, for seemingly out of nowhere, their queen materialized.

"What brings such a fine man to my house tonight?"

She was tall, and fair: so fair, her skin seemed translucent, and her hair a shining, spun-glass bleach twisted up into a forest of braids. Obviously not for sale, for her gown was of modest cut. No; modest was not the correct word. It was sewn with feathers and gauze in extravagance. She wore no jewels, and was silent in delicate slippers; in the stead of beads, a silken scarf was delicately knotted around her neck. Intricate kohl framed her eyes, curling down a pale cheek to point at dark red lips.

"I was told by a stabler Talon to seek news here," Ganondorf said. "I trust I have not been misinformed, Madam?"

The woman's laugh was low and restrained, but hardly mocking. "Please, you will find enough madams and my-ladies in Hyrule herself. Here I am simply Impaz, and this is my house." She clapped her hands with unexpected vigor, and conjured a petite girl to her side. Ganondorf could not have observed a more obedient, perfect response in any soldier of Calas' army that he had the displeasure of watching weeks before. "The old goat was right to send you here. This is Arin, she will tell you all that you care to know."

"And if she does not know what I ask?"

"Then it is not known to anyone in this village, nor to anyone upon the roads, or to anyone within reason within the castle's town," replied Impaz. "Perhaps it is not known at all, Lord...?"

"Dragmire," Ganondorf replied, dismissively. It had been a title once, or a false surname; he did not care. It served as a substitute for his own name well enough.

"Lord Dragmire, indeed," Impaz said. "Twenty rupees, and you may seclude yourself however you wish. There is... privacy in my house."

Ganondorf handed over the chipped rupee piece. Impaz cleaned it on her dress, as though it had been filthy. Ganondorf doubted that such a woman (and a stranger, more suspicious woman he had rarely seen!) had seen cleaner payment than his. Without another word, Impaz gestured at her girl, and before Ganondorf had seriously considered a destination they were in a small, secluded room on the second floor, walls draped with curtains to keep out the draft. A small fireplace burned within, consuming the same aromatic fuel that the whole place stank of. Ganondorf began to resent it; up close it was considerably less pleasant. Within, there was a real feather bed. The girl Arin clambered up upon it,and instead of stretching out languorous, crossed her legs and sat up straight and alert.

She could not have been older than sixteen: dark-haired and olive-skinned. Ganondorf had no desire for such a frail girl, and was glad he had bought only for news.

"Please sit, sir," she requested quietly. Her accent was Hylian, one of the low, peasant tongues, but she lacked their characteristic slurring or pidgin-dialect. "What do you wish to know?"

Ganondorf obliged her only reluctantly. It was not done to take orders from a stripling maid, but whatever small society they had made it was far more familiar to Ganondorf than the chaos of common bandits. Likely, he thought, this girl was the smallest of many sisters.

He chose his words carefully. "The Queen of Hyrule is overthrown," he said. "What has become of her?"

The girl's conduct was similar: pausing, and then forming her answer as if working a craft. "The throne has declared Queen Zelda an apostate and a pretender to the throne: the last of a long line of tyrants. She escaped with the help of her monster servant, but her whereabouts are unknown. I am sorry."

"That will do," Ganondorf assured, somewhat relieved. "What of her King, Calas?"

"Calas of Springspass, he is now the sole ruler of Hyrule, and recently has sent out dispatches to every corner of his kingdom: to the Gorons, to the southern villages, to the Kakariko hills, and to the northern spring pass. Others patrol the roads. They are probably looking for the lost Queen. I don't know. But I do know that many of the villages in Hyrule have been left alone for a long time. They aren't very happy that press-gangers are on their doorsteps. But they can't really do anything about it."

"What has become of the Moblins? Of the Bulblins, of the Lizalfos?"

The girl was very taken-aback by that question, and blinked for a few seconds, dazed. "Um," she hesitated. "That's not really current events. I don't know so much about savage folk. Do you really want to hear it?"

"I paid for you, did I not?"

"Er, Okay,' she mumbled. "A traveler I entertained once mentioned forest Moblin, so they may exist. Which I guess would be important, because the Moblins in the mountains got wiped out ages ago," she said. "Bulblins are still employed by the throne; they serve the strongest, and they've done that for generations. I don't know anything about lizard-men. I'm sorry, but the only other things I know about this are fairy stories."

"Has there been any talk of a hero emerging in Hyrule of any kind?" Ganondorf asked carefully. "In troubled times, swordsmen may rise to the task."

"None, sir," the girl said. "The only person I know called a hero in my life is Calas of Springspass, and that is why he married the Queen I suppose."

"You mentioned the Queen had in her service a monster servant. What do you know of it?"

Arin wrung her hands, and her words were halting; through her façade, she seemed truly frightened. "A demon," she said, voice lower than she probably realized, "of fire and black magic. It killed a dozen people in one hour, and nearly killed the King before it was forced to retreat, flying on dark wings. Simply for sufferings sake, I'm told, it animated a great statue and laid waste to the castle town square. It sought the blood of soldiers and nobles; all killed were military staff, or of the high court."

"Interesting," muttered Ganondorf. That was all he supposed he needed to know, but a few more questions could not have hurt. "Tell me all you know about Talon the stabler," he demanded.

"I don't know anything about horsegrooms," the girl admitted. "But I do know of Talon the Flesh-Rake. He was a favorite assassin of the High Court, once. However, once the man who sold Talon's services learned of some disloyalty, Talon was removed from service. That has to have been years ago."

"Could he not simply function as a free agent?"

Arin stared at Ganondorf, shaking her head. "You don't leave work peacefully if you're someone like him," she said, tapping her brow. "His master probably took away his talent, somehow, or had him executed."

Ganondorf began to form an idea of what had likely happened. "That will be all," he said. "That is all I need of your services."

"I hope I have been helpful," said Arin. "Please, would you leave me? You have not paid for more than news, and we do not accept debts in this house."

The feeling of eyes on his back returned. Ganondorf, with eyes trained of thievery and eons spent in darkness, picked out the distinctive glint of steel, of a crossbow bolt, set into a tiny hole in the wall beside him. And then he spotted another. And another. Every natural crack in the plaster was a murder hole, and the serious stare of the young woman in front of him impressed exactly how seriously this house took the safety of its girls. As seriously as in the past, as women of his own had taken their duties and the safety of their sisters.

Ganondorf smiled; it was a wide, unflinching smile that clouded the young girl's face with doubt and behind the walls set crossbow winches cranking. "You have been very helpful," he assured. "May you keep that virtue in the times to come, girl."

Helpful sorts, Ganondorf reasoned, could be spared in his ascension to power. So long as they remained such.

—

By the time that Ganondorf returned, night had fallen and the locals had begun to clear off of the streets. The inn patrons crowded tight inside, the house dense with vagrants that could not afford rooms. By closing hour, they all would be forced to find elsewhere to haunt. A giant among them, Ganondorf parted the bodies and thundered up the stairs. The floor under him throbbed with sound. Ale surplus? A caravan's arrival? Ganondorf didn't particularly care, but he was quickly growing tired living at the whim of rabble.

With luck, Zelda would be asleep. Ganondorf fit the iron key into the lock and with one hand braced and turned it. He'd learned the trick, but had mixed feelings about such a small action being a 'triumph.' Tired, tense, and reeking of horse, Ganondorf stumbled into his cramped room. Zelda was asleep; he could see her breath rise and fall faintly under the linens, but how she was able to drift off with the angry buzz of sound below was unknown to him. The work she had accumulated sat in dark piles around the floor. In the small window's light, the scattered midden and heaps of finished work were an abstract landscape of dim hills.

A landscape, Ganondorf noted, that was not cut by the shadows of steel-bar shutters. The window high on the wall was bare-open.

Zelda. Ganondorf surged forward, expecting to find some substitute in her bed. A shadow moved in Ganondorf's wake; the man stumbled. Hiding in plain sight, sprang to life and leapt at the wall. Ganondorf's arm reached across the gap, and yet the foe slipped through like water. Ferretlike, the figure was up the tall wall and through the small window faster than Ganondorf could stop it. From the view of the inn room, Ganondorf could see only a thatch-bare shed below. And no intruder.

"What?!" a high voice in his ear gasped, hardly audible over the dull thud from a floor below. Zelda was awake. "What's going on?!"

"An intruder," snarled Ganondorf. With a sharp flourish, he lit the candle on the table, revealing Zelda's wan face. He pointed demonstratively at the bare, open window. Picking up the candle in its cast-pewter holder, Ganondorf could see its flame quiver in his hands. Some part of him was quaking in rage, images flashing through his mind. Zelda dead, his only token of victory robbed from him. Zelda escaped, spirited away by some rescuer. Either possibility, even if neither had been true, boiled Ganondorf's blood.

"What did they take?" Zelda gasped, and frantically pawed at the mattress, where Ganondorf supposed she had hidden their collective wallet. How petty, he thought; money was replaceable. Any fool could have some.

"I don't care," Ganondorf said, "So long as it was not you. The last thing I need is some poor rescue. It would be a waste of my time, and yours." In the candle-light, Ganondorf inspected the rough edges of the window. Signs of filing were obvious on the flat stubs of the iron bars, and the grate had been removed; the telltale shavings alighted on the sill like rust-and-silver snow. Ganondorf could not see how anyone could have reached up so high to wear through the bars, for that took time and a tool to brace. He supposed the intruder had found a way. Perhaps the interloper was an acrobat, or had some sort of climbing gear. He would have to inspect the outside of the building by day.

"I don't particularly want a 'rescue,'" Zelda admitted softly. "I hate to admit it, but the safest place for me is here. Only the heavens know the size of the bounty placed upon me."

Ganondorf turned sharply to Zelda. She slumped back onto the bed in her white slip, rubbing her eyes. When her slim fingers alighted on the bruise over her temple, she winced. It had become quite purple over the course of the day. "Ward the door and windows. You did so to your quarters in the castle. Why are you so careless now?"

"It would have shut you out," Zelda said. "You would have had to break in to enter the room. My magic does not, and cannot distinguish one source of ill will from another. The King of Evil looks just the same to any ward as an assassin."

"I have taken down your pathetic wards before," Ganondorf said witheringly. "I can do it again."

"I am not so sure," said Zelda. Her eyes glittered with realization. "In that case, why ask your captive to make a barrier that by all rights should be simple to such a master of sorcery as you?"

Damn. Damn her. Damn her kin, and her ancestors, and all franchise ever given to her bloodline. "Go to sleep," he snarled, and snuffed the candle. But in the dark, Ganondorf could see her sit up in bed. Her pale eyes stared.

"You once summoned terrible beasts with a gesture, once ran across the fields on a demon steed, once enthralled a kingdom with darkness and despair even before the Triforce was yours," said Zelda resolutely. "And yet, I have hardly seen you perform more than a simple cantrip in my captivity. Not since we emerged from the aqueduct."

Ganondorf was silent. Maybe if he sat very still, and said nothing, she would grow tired of her endless stream of needling and end this business of being too close to the truth for comfort.

"Something's wrong," Zelda said, slowly.

"I am not sure why you care," said Ganondorf.

Zelda's reply was immediate. "I care when you are likely all that stands between me and the enemy," she said.

Hyrule, Zelda's enemy.

Interesting, Ganondorf thought.

"What did you do," asked Zelda, "that you are no longer able to even cast protective wards?" A pale glow surrounded her hands, and after a few heartbeats of setting the spell's scope and limits, the soft sheen of her shield suffused the surroundings. Even the sound of the chattering inn seemed muted. There would be no further disturbances that night.

"I did nothing," he said, taking a gamble with indulging her sudden need to know. "That is why this is maddening."

In the moon's light, Ganondorf could see Zelda's mouth form a sudden 'o,' and she began to speak. But as she seemed to reconsider that, she fell silent, and soon lay down to bed. Ganondorf doubted she slept, at least for the little while longer he remained awake. But, for all her maddening talk and interest in affairs she should have kept silent on, Ganondorf was relieved that at least she was Zelda again. This was within her role, to provoke him, to work within his restrictions.

Ganondorf then realized with dread that even if Zelda had submitted to him and fell into despair, it would not have pleased him. For Zelda did not succumb, the foe he sought and kept in triumph was not so easily crushed. There was no overcoming of her that he could say would satisfy him. He had grown too used to losing, he thought. He had come to identify Zelda with her success in opposing him.

That was why she was worth it. That was why she was important. That was why she was dangerous. When others fell and died at his feet, she won. When kingdoms crumbled in his grasp, she won. The Hero was her tool, and he hated the boy, but at the end of days it was the throne of Hyrule that benefited from Ganondorf's defeat. Zelda was simply not Zelda unless she was fighting for victory. And she was never more herself when she finally prevailed. And that triumphant Zelda was the one worth keeping captive, the one that was a threat.

His goal was to crush her, keep her, and use her until she had no more value to him. But if all of that came to pass, thought Ganondorf, what he held in his hands would not have been worth conquering anyway: stripped of all value and burned to dead cinders. It was not his intention to conquer a cremation.

—

Ganondorf concluded that it was only a matter of time. Time wasted, an itching, impatient part of him nagged. But it was unavoidable, he thought. It was not his nature to hide, or to cower from a challenge... but if he was to keep Zelda, to use her to find the full Triforce, he would have to have freedom of movement. From what he could tell from the Naked Eye's news, and from what little he heard in the thief's town, the roads were anything but free. Goods and food became scarcer. People starved, and even the unlikely began to turn to banditry to make ends meet. Iron taken from Hyrule's empire, scraps of imperial armor and swords claimed from dead soldiers, began to turn up en masse in the bazaar. Ganondorf did not doubt his ability to handle any mere footman or rider he encountered, but to his shame uncertainty plagued him in the case of being faced by a large group.

He'd forgotten this, he thought, as he braced the iron fork in one off hand. Being the small, being the fugitive, being the criminal. In the past, he thought, his sisters were sneering. How used to privilege he'd become, to trappings of nobility, to being able to venture wherever he pleased simply on the might of his fists and the potency of his sorcery. How was it possible that despite centuries of oblivion in the middle, and yet the voice of his aunts snapped sharply in his ears?

You have become like them! How long have your ears grown, boy, that you think yourself entitled to walk anywhere you want?

He'd meant to change that, of course. Without their King, he thought, the Hylians would lose what claim they had to the heavens, and that by removing them he could take the throne of divinity and rip asunder the judgement placed upon him. It was far too long ago to remember exactly how it had all gone sour. The opposite had occurred. His people had died, he had become cursed for all time before the gods, and most of all nothing had changed.

Ganondorf tossed the weed-straw at the wall bitterly, separating the waste from what could be saved. The last point, he thought, was the astounding part. For all his might, for all of being the embodiment of power on the earth, Ganondorf had failed to change a thing. Whatever he built was always broken.

A sharp scream of a horse split the barn, followed by yells of a man. Ganondorf straightened, his back cracking painfully. The heavy thuds of hooves on the dirt-packed floor stomped back and forth, pounding against abused wooden walls. Stepping outside the thatch-and-mud stall, Ganondorf was met with the sight of a mud-bald pony being beaten by the other hired hand Ingo with a hefty oak switch. It cried out, bucked, but could not escape where it was tied to the cross-harness by thick knots.

"Damn you, animal! You will pick up your feet! You will be shod!"

Foolishness, thought Ganondorf. Foolishness and stupidity. Such an animal was likely infested with rot and mites, making the legs tender and the beast testy. And yet, this idiot Hylian scum could not understand, would never understand what commodity he was beating to death. What wasted value. How common, to assume defiance when the issue ran deeper than mere stubbornness.

Throwing the iron fork down, Ganondorf strode out of the stall he had worked on and waited briefly for Ingo to raise the rod. Ganondorf snatched it and easily wrenched it from the older, smaller man's hand.

"This doesn't concern you, boy," spat Ingo. "Don't interfere with the breaking of this beast."

Ganondorf's answer was simply to take one end of the switch in his teeth and grip hard. Wrenching it with the full strength of his good arm and the corded muscles of his back, what might have been an old broomhandle shattered into a fan of splinters. Ingo went milky, the nerve draining out of him like a barrel with a hole in the bottom. If Ganondorf would not have been wrong to propose Ingo had sprung a leak in more ways than one.

"You will never waste a beast again," Ganondorf said, hardly needed to; Ingo was on his heels and running almost before the end of the statement. Moments later, all that remained was a quaking, frozen horse on the cross-ties and the awkward remains of the wooden switch. Ganondorf spat a few fragments out, and massaged his numb jaw.

The horse stood warily, uncomprehending. I saved you, beast, thought Ganondorf. And you hardly understand. Charity. Useless; he was the same as he was before. It had not filled his time, nor given him someplace or something to think about. There was no reward in it, nor had it been a step in approaching a goal.

Though, Ganondorf amended, that was not entirely true. As he untied the knots binding the horse to the stable rings, he quietly and bitterly amended one aspect of his philosophy. Perhaps it was not his reward, but a ruined horse served no purpose, had no value. He had not thought of any sort of reward when he'd stepped between Ingo and his victim; there was only anger and disgust at wasted worth. That was an old sentiment of his, very old.

How he had seen wars rage, how he had seen spoils won. And how he had seen starving women, his people, get none of what they had fought for. It was appropriate that his home had once been called _wasteland_. And how he had yearned, burned, for the power to step between Hyrule and his own lands, to smite their throne with exactly the value of the Gerudo. As the centuries wore on, that want transformed; a lust for the power to halt the heavens themselves, and remove their mastery from the earth. His earth.

The beast back in a stall once again, nursing its tender flanks, Ganondorf leaned against the mud-brick wall of the stable tiredly. What of the middle, he thought? Too many lifetimes, instances, and deaths bled together; none shaped him. There were hardly any waypoints in the murk of that long consciousness to find, no paths to navigate. Perhaps there were pearls, hidden in the muck of his memory, but to extract them would be like sifting for sand in silt.

Ganondorf even ventured to call that time wasted.

He gathered up his small sack, job half-finished, and that day did not seek Talon for payment. As he stepped on the street, his scowl parted the crowd. Wasted! His long, grand life, wasted! How sour it was to think more deeply upon it and realize that Zelda, with her infernal storybook, was right with his single mention. What more was there to say, of the past nigh-thousand years? Beyond that, the truth faded into antiquity, unknown to all but himself.

For a long time, Ganondorf had deemed his existence some great cycle of hatred and abuse, some tyranny upon him that he constantly tried to shake off. And yet, when he rose, he was always punished for it, always beaten down again. The idea that all that, everything, had been a waste of time, was enough to bow any lesser man. Ganondorf did his best to leave those thoughts behind, in the prints of his boots and the dust of the filthy street as he plowed through the street.

He crashed into a wall of men, and snarled in surprise. When they did not part ways, he looked up from his thoughts to see them all with backs turned, gazing at the sky. The entire bazaar stared, awestruck, for once unconcerned with Ganondorf's imposing height and force of travel. That was all it took for the man himself to follow their gaze, for what they could be so rapt in watching.

A huge plume of greasy black smoke towered up from only a few lines of jumbled buildings away, from the main square. The fire was new, for the towering cloud had not yet blown in the wind: minutes-old, if that. In such close quarters, surrounded by such waste, the flames would certainly spread, and quickly.

They would spread from the town square.

They would spread from their inn.

_Zelda_.

Ganondorf ran.


	13. 12

As he dreaded, the inn had gone up like a fistful of tinder. United for once, men and women of all kinds dropped what they were doing to fling buckets of sand, mud, and water upon the flames, and the spread was halted for the time being. It was an oily fire with few sparks, and with luck would stay in one place. But there was no helping the inn; already he could see its skeletal remains poking out of the belching flames. The stench was incredible: burning waste, toxic smoke, mixed with the unmistakable char of overcooked flesh.

"You!"

Ganondorf seized the nearest person, a bedraggled human woman, and lifted her by the collar. She shrieked but froze in terror as he gazed at her. Like a mouse caught by a snake, she seemed to resign to her fate with glassy, expectant eyes. "There was a woman within the building, with hair of brass. Did she leave before this mess?"

The woman nodded vigorously. "Aye, I saw..." she shuddered. "I saw the whole thing!"

Ganondorf clenched his fist hard enough that his knuckles cracked. "Tell me what happened. Now."

"I'd say it was Blind's men, they'd have the gall to look for bounties with smoke. They smoked the whole place out," the woman stammered. "Then they went inside, and then... there was a flash, a bright light. Then the whole place caught fire! But they came out anyway dragging the woman behind them. She messed them up good, but didn't stand a chance once the smoke reached her. That stuff'll put anyone out."

He threw her down to the dirt, raking the air in frustration with a claw-like hand. "Tell me where they went!" he demanded. The woman drew up into a small ball, terrified.

"They put her into a sack, but I don't know where they went. I... I was busy with the fire... Please, I'll do anything you want. Just don't hurt me. I'm sorry, I don't know..."

"You're useless," Ganondorf snarled. "Get out of my sight."

And she was eager to oblige him, to flee into the crowd. She was right, thought Ganondorf. None of these fools likely had seen where they'd taken Zelda. They were too concerned with the fire, and had all turned their backs to the business Pretty women could be snatched from their rooms at any time in this place, he reasoned. Why would they bother to pay attention when spreading flames could consume their home?

Worse, all supplies and weapons that the two of them had gathered, they had been in that rented room. There was no point in hoping that something could be salvaged; looters likely would pick the embers clean even before they cooled. Ganondorf was once again left with nothing: not a sword, not armor, not even rupees beyond the few he carried in his own pocket. Though, he thought, that was not quite true. Ganondorf had from the scene, a name to track. Leaving the inn's wreck behind him, Ganondorf ground his heel into the ash-covered road and set off at a forceful pace.

—

The Naked Eye was shuttered tight for the day, closed to patrons. Ganondorf didn't particularly care; he would get his answers even if he had to rip a hole in the wall. However, when he reached for the real metal doorknob in the building's real wooden door, he found it turned easily. Unlocked. He swung the door open to the empty front hall. A fire burned low in the grate in the far wall, casting a flickering, hazy light on the single figure in the room.

Ganondorf recognized the silhouette before he saw a face.

"You are the weasel that stole into my room," he said, teeth grinding. "Explain yourself."

The figure stepped out of the shadow Ganondorf cast, to show his face. Vaguely, Ganondorf could recall that face: one of the serving staff of the establishment. He was young, only a boy, and thin as a reed. There was a vulpine cast to him, unblinking and focused. His sandy hair poked through a bracken-dyed cap, overgrown and shaggy.

Ganondorf had not realized it previously, but in this new context the boy was familiar enough for him to mark. And the face of what this era had the pretensions to name Hero was more than Ganondorf was willing to tolerate. He contemplated just killing the boy now before he could do damage, but reconsidered. Answers first, he decided.

"My father ordered me to," the boy said sheepishly. "I'm sorry for breaking in. It's not personal."

Ganondorf's eyes flashed warningly. "And what did you find, boy?"

"Well," he said, shrugging, "It's a good thing that you haven't killed the Queen Zelda yet."

When it came to would-be Heroes, that was a subject to avoid. "Where can I find 'Blind?'"

"You're standing in the door, and we don't have a lot of time," the boy said. "Can we speak on the way? I've been waiting for you for half an hour, and that's kind of a waste."

Ganondorf dwarfed his opposition, and with a wild lunge made to seize the boy's neck. With surprising agility, the foe drew out of the way, dodging just far enough to avoid the grapple.

"Ending your life would be a waste," Ganondorf threatened, "so explain quickly. Unless your news is to be paid for in rupees like that of the whores."

The boy froze, paused, and nodded silently. His voice was barely a whisper, and his points halting. "The Naked Eye is a front," he started. "We are spies and assassins, and we have protected the throne for centur-"

"Not that," Ganondorf snarled. "I knew that as soon as I found you here. You are no common burglar."

"Actually, I'm still in training..."

"Speak!" Ganondorf roared, shaking the ceiling with the boom of his voice. A few women upstairs banged on the floor in frustration at the noise. "Tell me where to find 'Blind.' Now."

"His sort hide out in the fort below the town, in the old garrison. He means to collect the bounty. My father might already be there, but even he's not going to take on all of Blind's men, not even if he has some girls with him."

Ganondorf turned on his heel and made to walk back into the street, his simple question answered. It was as the stupid boy said; there was no time to waste. If there was a barracks below the city, it could be easily found now that he knew to look. He was stopped, however, by a hand catching his bad arm. Ganondorf threw it off, only to see the young man holding a blade out to him, handle-first, as if to offer it.

"Hey, it's dangerous to go alone," he said. "You might as well take this, too."

—

The entrance (one of many, the boy implied) was discrete, hidden inside an active brewery. The scent of the hard liquor within was enough to repel any sane man in the first place; the boy who led Ganondorf tottered and stumbled a few times through the most noxious fumes, until they came to a tightly shut hatch.

A Sheikah stood before it. A walking impossibility in this age, thought Ganondorf. Yet, there one was: masked and tightly bound in dark linen and leather. He was tall and lithe, with long, bone-bleached hair pulled into a thick braid weighted with an intimidatingly sharp steel counterbalance. It kept strangely perfect time as he walked forward: left on the right foot, right on the left foot.

"You shouldn't meddle in my affairs, shadow-walker," Ganondorf warned. "Zelda is in my hands, and you shall not have her."

"I don't think Zelda is anywhere near your hand, singular," said the Sheikah, with an unexpectedly high tenor. "And it was my boy that brought you here. Your affairs are mine, Dragmire."

Ganondorf could nearly feel the Sheikah's piercing stare even through the mask.

"Though that is not your name."

"Of course it isn't," Ganondorf said. "I am the Great King of Evil, Ganondorf, and you are nothing to me. "

"Don't talk to my father that wa-"

The Sheikah merely held out a hand, and the boy fell silent. "Rest, Link. I am not offended." The pause he took was slight. "You would run me through if you thought I was nothing, Evil One. What is it you want from me?"

"For you to get out of my way, before I take your suggestion!"

"Oh, you cannot be so dull-witted. I offer you answers from Impaz, in the flesh, and entirely for free! Time is short," said the Sheikah, as his braid swung back to the left, "but not quite so short."

Ganondorf's brow wrinkled, leonine in momentary confusion. "Impaz is a..." he paused, eyes running down the Sheikah's quite-indeterminate form. "And you are... No. You are wasting my time."

"He is sharper-witted than most," Impaz said. "And he is right. I have been stopping him here. And here is why."

The hatch behind Impaz opened with a snap, and two young girls climbed out, similarly masked: keaton's faces carved in plaster. Their sensible breeches were covered in soot. Long knives sat knotted into cloth sashes at their waists, and their fingers were taped. Ganondorf wondered if these were the same girls that entertained in the evening, or if they were presented some sort of choice between banditry and whoring. He found the arrangement somewhat more unfamiliar than he was comfortable with.

"It's clear," one said. Both ignored the huge gerudo that conversed with Impaz; Ganondorf, likely was not part of their instructions.

"But they will have to break through. The way is still sealed," added the other, sadly. "It's flooded right now."

"It will do. Ablis, Meena," said Impaz, "you both get off to bed. Tonight will be a long night."

They filed out quickly, quiet as ghosts. Ganondorf watched them go, alien to their world. They'd likely communicated a thousand things to their patron, and to the boy Link, without a word. Whatever it had been, Impaz stood aside from the hatch, and with wiry hands gestured to the passage down into the mesa. Ganondorf pushed him aside, leaving the Sheikah to stumble a bit, straighten his mask, and brush off in irritation.

"They'll have hushed the trouble on this side of the wall, but it is up to you to break through into the Blind's hive," explained Impaz. "Link, chaperon the demon king, would you? I have work I must do."

Ganondorf feigned disinterest as he began to climb down the small trapdoor, his shoulders an uncomfortably close fit. It was slow going, with one hand. He listened to the bantering pair above him. Though they were likely his dire enemies, he reasoned, the Sheikah and the boy were... odd. He supposed that if the line of Zeldas could become ruthless tyrants, the legacy of the Hero could be reduced to serving boys.

"Do I have to?" Link asked, voice shaking.

"Yes," replied Impaz. "Now get along, dear, and answer what the man may ask. He is important."

And with not much more than a grunt for 'yes,' the boy was down the hatch and the door was closed, plunging Ganondorf and his hanger-on into darkness. The ladder creaked ominously under them, protesting their weight. Ganondorf decided that he would tolerate the imposition on his person only so far as it would provide answers; the child would be easy enough to eliminate or lose afterward.

"If your... family... has disposed of the watch down here, I will ask my questions now," Ganondorf said. "First, where did Impaz leave for?"

Link was silent for a heartbeat before answering, as if deeply considering the answer. "I'm not sure, sir," he said. "But he wants you to get the Queen back, and she was going to be sold for her bounty. Father probably went to go stop the soldiers that mean to collect her. Dealing with Blind will be hard, but dealing with Blind and soldiers would be impossible."

"Tell me of Blind. What is he?"

"Blind is powerful man," Link said simply. " He owns the smuggling, he owns the money. He owns the people. Not even father crosses him often. But with your help, Blind won't rule this town any longer."

"I'm not working for Impaz," Ganondorf snarled.

Link was unbowed. "You don't really have to. Blind has the Queen, you want the Queen, we don't want Blind, and we want the Queen safe. Everybody wins."

"You do realize I will kill your Queen," Ganondorf said. "Eventually."

"If Hyrule gets the Queen, she'll hang by Din's-day," said Link. "Which is sooner than 'eventually.' "

"You talk too much," Ganondorf grumbled.

"You asked for answers," said Link. "If you'd like, I can be mute."

Unwilling to waste this free source of news, no matter how irritating it was, Ganondorf decided to endure. His blood boiled, not only in annoyance but in proximity. Was this one of the heroes destined to fail: too frail, too young? Or would this irritating child one day kill him? "What threat is Blind, sitting alone in an exile town?"

"Next to Father, Blind's information ring in Hyrule is the most complete. It would be bad if Calas got his hands on it. Or the Queen."

The poison with which the boy spat the King's name was startling, even to Ganondorf. There was no point in asking about the circumstances; Ganondorf could easily imagine a thousand ways to make an orphan. Ganondorf's boots found the bottom, lit only by a small crack under a heavy shutter. Beyond it was the first of many rooms, or caves: cut directly into the sandstone. At a single table slumped two men, too still to be sleeping. Link didn't look twice at them. What more was there to extract from the boy, Ganondorf wondered? He let Link through the door first to pick ahead, to attract any nonsense that would befall them. If there was some sort of ambush, let the child be skewered, he thought.

There were no halls in this place, learned Ganondorf; it was all a honeycomb of rooms. Some, half-collapsed, some partially flooded from the surrounding swamp. Firelight faded in the ruin, and soon Link was forced to produce a small tin lantern. Ganondorf was unexpectedly pleased to use the boy to light the way, for it left his hand free to steady himself. After a point, there was more hole than floor, reducing the path forward to crumbling tile bridges. Fetid water filled everything below, forming treacherous sinks and stagnant pools anywhere that hadn't been bricked over.

"You could have found a way inside closer to the goal," Ganondorf grumbled, pushing away the worm-eaten remains of a plank desk. It had all been picked clean, only rot and stone remained. "This isn't worth my time."

"Did you want the dungeon?" Link said. "We're not going to drop into Blind's lap, that's stupid."

"Then what did you drop us into?"

"A bolt hole, I think," said Link. "I thought there were more men down here. Ablis must have thrown them into one of these pools to clean up."

Talk of pools proved to be some kind of herald, for as soon as they hit the air, Ganondorf found himself in a gaping cavern filled with a small lake: stretching into blackness on the far wall. The water within was dark, and deep. Faintly in the murk, Ganondorf could see suspicious outlines. Tables, chairs. Where the glare of Link's lantern was thinnest, even the suggestions of skulls and large bones. It was difficult to tell from the grey swamp outside, but the flooding had once been a catastrophic, flash event, and the village above had been built atop a tomb.

Link pulled a long coil of rope from where it hung by his belt, and grabbed its heavy, iron grappling tip. Ganondorf watched him fling it into the shadows, where miraculously it stuck firm on the ceiling caught in some invisible tangle of stones. Link swung across, but for Ganondorf... it was not so easy. The boy tossed the rope back, but Ganondorf eyed it with suspicion. Unlike the boy, he weighed more than a monkey. Sighing heavily, Ganondorf tossed the line back and did his best to clear his mind.

Walking through a warp in space, or powered flight, those were out of the question with such a tiny remaining wellspring of power. But maintaining a constant altitude above the ground, and sliding across... he knew enchanters could easily place such a spell on inanimate objects; invoking it should have been a trifle. Ganondorf took a step backward, and then another, ignoring the boy's face, lit by lantern-light. The mouth twisted, Ganondorf could read 'what are you doing' before he looked away, too focused to care. Releasing tense muscles, he surged forward and made as if to leap into the dark water.

If this failed...

Ripping forth his magic and forcing it into service, Ganondorf planted his feet on nothing at all and began to run across the air, only inches from the pool's surface. Even with his eyes clenched shut, Ganondorf could feel himself dip lower with every long stride as he strained to keep a hold on the spell. When his boots finally hit hard ground, Ganondorf released a tight breath he hadn't even noticed he'd been holding in. His soul felt sore, as if this only safe source of sorcery was an atrophied muscle he'd then overtaxed. The boy didn't notice, though, and stared with huge eyes.

"You're a magician," he said, sheepishly.

That and more, thought Ganondorf. Though, no matter how quickly he now pressed forward, the continuing way was bricked up: slathered with uneven mud-plaster. Only habitation would make such action necessary. Ganondorf ran his hand over it, quickly locating the shatterpoint: where the cracks converged as the poor job had dried. This was where walls broke. Ganondorf considered himself a specialist when it came to destruction, and this hardly was the extent of his talents. No, this was easy.

"Watch, boy."

Ganondorf braced himself on the tiles, and with a powerful kick sent the clay bricks crashing away in every direction. A shower of sticky dust flew back in their faces. Cries of surprise were obvious.

The wan faces that met them... a part of Ganondorf thrived on such terror. He surged forward through the haze, sword drawn, and cut them down. Gore painted the walls, and that was the end of the first man. Ganondorf's element of surprise did not extend to the second, and he narrowly evaded a hatchet strike to the temple. It scored the leather of his jerkin instead, and drew blood into his off shoulder.

What he didn't expect was the boy, Link, and how he leaped through the the boy was alarmingly waist-height even to Ganondorf, who dodged aside with terrible visions of a different sword in that bony hand. Ganondorf felt the impact in his own sternum as Link made mortal contact. The foe toppled supine. It struggled briefly, and then wilted: breathless. Link quietly pulled his long knife from the fallen body, not waiting for the victim to choke to death or bleed out.

"We're supposed to find the Queen," said Link quietly, "Not kill people and make a racket."

Ganondorf scowled at the boy, but was cautious enough of his stare: the eerie soldier's eyes, and even the Great King of Evil knew that these didn't belong on a child. No, yet another thing he'd created. "By entering we have made noise enough," said Ganondorf. "Noise is unavoidable."

And as soon as he spoke, three more of Blind's party rounded the corner. Which was perfect, thought Ganondorf. Absolutely perfect.

"Spy! Assassin!" roared Ganondorf, hiding his bloodied sword and pointing wildly at Link . "The child is an intruder!"

"What?! What are you d-"

The men cried out, enraged. They charged in revenge, just like the fools they were. "Make noise," ordered Ganondorf, and shoved Link at the howling bandits. There wasn't hope for the boy to fight them all, so he ran right through them: exactly the monkey that had infiltrated his dark room, weeks ago.

Fools. They'd chase the pup, and ignore the wolf.

Tracking blood through the lit halls now, Ganondorf threw open every door he came across. There was no way to tell what existed in each room, leaving him to simply lay whatever was inside to waste. Luckily, most of them were unarmed. And they screamed like sheep as he cut them down, or ran and forgot him. Barracks. Kitchens. Waste rooms...He did not know where his prize was kept.

It was five doors down his search that Ganondorf found it: a well-locked door. Treasury, perhaps, or some more important area. The hinges were thick, streaked black with oil. Ignoring the handle, Ganondorf ran a single finger around the wide keyhole. No fire from hell, he supposed, no great wrecking power was his to grasp anymore. But the blood seethed in his brain, and he knew exactly how much damage a targeted, small blast could do. Ganondorf discarded the smoking remains of the lock and cast the door wide open, to find a dimly lit hall. Or if it had been a hall once, it was transformed into a natural cavern, with doors re-cut into bricked-square arches. It was not storage, though it was labyrinthine with shelves. It was not private, for it was open to a higher floor by means of an upper gallery.

Ganondorf understood.

It was a showroom, wealth-for-display: the prizes of a thief. A very different sort of thief from himself, Ganondorf thought with displeasure. Crates of precious iron and steel, stolen goods, fine rugs and expensive cloths. Even the counting-table was stacked with loose riches: foreign coins and glass rupees alike.

A small rose pouch caught Ganondorf's eye on that table. He squinted as he reached for it, and only when he closed fingers around the it did he identify the familiar satin. He'd balled this cloth in a fist, sent Zelda flying to her doom. He'd felt it on his shoulder, clinging to him for life. Zelda's wages, in Zelda's pouch. Here? Not in ashes? Why here, when it was a pittance next to her bounty?

The answer was as clear to him as the whistle of the arrow in his ears. Reflex snapped him to bear, Ganondorf lifted his right arm to catch the flight or deflect it with a sorcerous shield, forgetting... the lightning of diffused magic accompanied the thunder of the steel arrowhead impacting and deflecting from Ganondorf's metal wristcap.

"Not wages," snarled Ganondorf. "It was your fee!"

He sped after a vanishing shock of hair, a copper flash. Throwing down the wallet and drawing his sword once more, Ganondorf boiled with rage. So much trouble for this? For her? The shelves blurred, detail lost in his red fog. The burned inn, her struggle... all staged! She had endured so long, done his bidding, and for this? It was not betrayal, it was expected. But then... to buy her way out from under him in this way...!

Ganondorf's arm bruised with pain as he knocked a row of shelves aside. Pellets of insence scattered everywhere. "The men! Your patch-work! You were hiring when they came to the door!" he roared, shaking what felt like the bones of the mesa. "Hiring them to take you back! All without leaving your chai-"

A terrible, burning shock slammed into the back of his leg. Like a snakebite, it seethed up his veins, spread by a wildly beating heart. Ganondorf's cry shook the dust from urns all along the back wall. Piercing white flooded his vision, pins digging into every nerve. He tasted blood in his mouth: blood and the familiar note of ozone and sunlight that her magic reeked of. But it faded. Quickly. And he moved as surely as before, and Ganondorf realized that in the church, in the vault, Zelda's shots and their potency... they had not been strong. Newly remade, Ganondorf had been weak. Here he was, mortal but healthy, and she was still...

"Pitiful!" he bellowed, spying the glint of arrowheads in the dim light, high above him in the gallery. "It was true! You told me yourself!"

He sheathed his sword. With his great height and single hand, Ganondorf seized a heavy oak bookshelf and crashed it against the wall. Scaling it with dirty boots, he gained enough reach to seize the rough lip of the upper balcony. He thrust his stump into the crumbling, water-chewed stone. The nerves jolted and stung, possibly bleeding anew under the cap, but the anchor held as he climbed.

"Your providence is fading!"

And there she was, backing away and aiming - a second arrow sprouted from Ganondorf's shoulder, weaker than the first. And Ganondorf knew, she could have united the arrowhead with his heart easily. If not for the fear in her he could see so plainly, raw on a face meant to be so cold.

"Your aim falters!"

Ganondorf heaved himself over the rise, nearly tearing across the ground on all fours, this single focus on her clear in his vision. There she was, and this was... he'd finally-

"Zelda! You will fall!"

And then a man Ganondorf had never seen before pushed him from the gallery, no more than an unknown hand from the left. Ganondorf was cast through space, dark celing shying away until a constellation bloomed behind his eyelids, blanking his mind. Vaguely, he was aware of a dull crunch, and a blade of pain. Then, everything was still. Ganondorf did not know if it was terror, or if he had learned some new, more dreadful unfamiliar sensation. Whatever it was, it numbed him. Death? He'd dealt that many times before. And now in an ocean of silence, his heart beat against his ears. That was how he knew he was alive. And, in this agonizing calm, he asked why? What had he been prepared to do, and why? He needed Zelda alive, surely, so why...?

Reflex. The impulse to destroy her: he'd been attacked by her so many times, it had become a reflex. Yet, when Zelda had seemed to vanish, to have left him to die, there was a voice.

"You are a poor bodyguard," said a man.

Ganondorf found himself wishing it was Zelda, instead.

"What sort of guard seeks to punish their client?"

The man hovered, just out of reach, in the sea of stars.

"It's almost as if," he paused, an ego's pause, "it was the other way around. She your warden, not you hers."

Fighting numb sluggishness, Ganondorf swept to his feet. He could hear the man jump back in surprise, the scratch in the muddy tile. "Zelda is in my control!"

"I'm sad to say she's slipped through your fingers."

"Where is she?!"

A wide, yawning pause stifled the air. Ganondorf could hear creaking timbers, could practically smell the sentiment in the air. That is, next to the chorus of breathing.

"You can't see, her, nor anything, can you?" the man said. "Ironic; the one time I don't mean to..."

"Where is she?!"

"The fall's cracked your skull," said the man. "How are you even standing?"

"I've had worse," Ganondorf said honestly. He groped through unfamiliar space for his sword: on the wrong side first, then fumbling the hilt in his haze. And it was true, for the man that must have been the infamous bandit Blind was sparing words with him- he knew not the danger he was in!

Ganondorf swung, and missed.

And missed again. The man laughed now, obviously he didn't know who he was dealing with.

For a third time, Ganondorf's fist flew wide as he struck at the voice in the dark. And with rare silence in his mind, he conceded that with the head wound this approach wasn't working. Focus, he forced upon himself. In the field of stars, there was still sound, and so long as he could breathe and sense, he could not be defeated. The footsteps behind him were sharp and heavy, the weight braced upon them tightly wound. Ganondorf spun on his heel in alarm, and felt a deep wound sink into his side, a thin blade tossed off-mark that struggled to bite into the muscle of his flank. If there was a blade, there was a hand to hold it. Ganondorf seized the foe's wrist and with a violent twist he forced the man to his knees. The rewarding cry was cut short; all Ganondorf had to hold him down was his heavy boot. Shaking fingers drew the short sword from his flesh. Ganondorf had no more vision to dim, but he could feel himself slipping down into a dark lake, and he struggled to tread deep water.

There wasn't time, Ganondorf quickly struck forth with it, but his gushing wound drained his arms. Bloodlessly, he failed to connect. You were mortal, he thought, but he was too tired for dread. His injuries would never have hindered him in any previous lifetime, but it seems living men accumulated them like fruit took to bruises, each one crushing more and more strength away until that fragile body failed. The way a normal man died, it was not one-to-one in mortal combat, but from crushed skulls, reckless action and frenzy. From backstabs not bestowed by treacherous allies but by greedy and triumphant strangers.

Ganondorf knew failure, knew defeat and the rage that went with it. But hardly any so hollow as the failure of a foolish, mortal man: of which he had killed so many. Powerlessly, he slumped forward: great weight pinning Blind's legs beneath him. The clouded star-field went entirely dark.

...

...

He tasted something sweet and rank. The fumes attacked his nose with caustic fury: vaguely of menthe, but strongly of vinegar. The saccharine flavor was to mask that medicinal reek, but there was only so far that juice of beet could go. The mixture slid down Ganondorf's throat almost as if it was alive, too thick and oily to be anything that ought to have belonged in a human gullet.

Ganondorf took a deep breath, deeper than he had for minutes, and felt sickly warmth spread through his body. He was blessedly numb as the flesh on his side, the cut on his shoulder flowed closed. Steel arrowheads clicked to the floor as his own flesh pushed them out. The sensation felt like bees swarming over the wounds. The heat flooded up his neck, tickled the base of his skull until it incited a sickly crack- and then a crunching as the bone reset itself. The dim galaxies in his sight sharpened painfully, suddenly into sharpness and color and once again he could see...!

He could see Link crouching in front of him, holding an empty flask. The stopper on the ground was smeared with a blue, viscous liquid of a shade not commonly found in nature. Ganondorf recognized it as a magic concoction, a strong one. These potions were able to reverse recent wounds, but at the expense of lost energy and a little more than an unsettled stomach. Even as large as he was, Ganondorf already felt slightly faint. But that could have been the blood loss, he remarked.

Ganondorf shoved the boy out of the way, and kicked the unfortunate corpse of what must have been Blind the thief off of him. Both bodies echoed dully as they hit the stone floor, but Ganondorf seized the dead thief as he stood, and inspected the damage. The man was thin, mousy and definitely different from Ganondorf's mental image. It didn't matter, however.

What mattered was that Blind had perished not from a stab to the gut, but from a protruding arrow wound. It was immaculate: neat in the back of his neck, separating the spine. Death had been instant.

Ganondorf looked up, to the doors still blasted open and swinging on their hinges.

"She's gone," offered Link.

"Yes, obviously," Ganondorf snarled.


	14. 13

The main entrance of the lair was somewhat more obvious than the brewery bolt-hole had been. Ganondorf instantly understood why it would have been a useless idea to walk in the front door: it was a tradehouse in the middle of the makeshift city. Tearing through it would have given the operation precious time to mount something more organized than the poor resistance Ganondorf had faced down below.

Not that it had mattered. Zelda was gone and away. Ganondorf's foul mood didn't temper him; he nearly wrenched the front doors off their shrieking hinges as he burst through. "And where were you?"

Link was quite small, hidden in the wake of Ganondorf's fury. The tradesmen scattered; the few of Blind's old guards inside left took one look at Ganondorf and fled for their lives. The man himself hadn't really considered what he would look like, walking about after the struggle down below. His wounds were closed, but his clothes still were sodden with gore, and his sword blood-smeared. Ganondorf couldn't put it away in such a state; he just kept it out. Let them run, a satisfied part of him said. They ought to run.

"Meeting father," said Link after a nervous pause. "But more important things happened, so I had to come get you."

"I was a fool to think there wasn't more to this," Ganondorf grumbled. He'd been taken for a ride, he realized. How hadn't it been obvious? How could it have been so simple to think that Zelda merely needed rescuing and there was a Sheikah and a would-be Hero on watch to guide him into the bandits' lair so smoothly and easily, that they'd not bat an eye at him as the King of Evil? The boy had clearly been instructed to double back, and Ganondorf had let him out of his sight!

How foolish have I become to let a spy run loose?!

Ever since that whack on the head, Ganondorf had become acutely aware of how this one flaw, this one succeptibility to panic and fury had seemingly ruined absolutely everything he'd managed to reclaim. And it sickened him that it was so difficult to understand his surroundings while unable to stop himself; how does one realize he has to think harder when the problem is a fundamental lack of thought? He spit on a rag, a corner of what was his ruined sleeve, and roughly wiped off his blade. A sickly gush of gelatinous blood and fat slid off the tip, leaving it stained but at least clean. Ganondorf put it away; he'd polish away the faint red taint later.

"It doesn't matter," he snarled out loud. "The girl can't have gotten far, without money, shelter, resources..."

"Actually, she has a cache," Link said.

"What?! How!?" Ganondorf's pace quickened over the filth and dirt paths, parting the crowd. "She hadn't left her room!"

Link's voice could barely be heard over the clatter and the dull hum of the street noise. "She tucked notes into mens' pockets. Eventually one reached my father's eyes, and we prepared one for her. That's why I broke into your rooms, to leave the instructions about where the cache was, when she escaped."

The boy's voice turned wistful, as if recounting a job well-done. "They were rolled up in a spool of thread."

"I'm not a fool," snapped Ganondorf, "If you had not entered to take from me, then you had to have left something behind."

"Then why didn't you find it?" asked Link, innocently. "And stop it?"

"I don't have the patience for your games," said Ganondorf, in a tone that cleared half the street. "I don't care to search every damn tangle of thread, or for your useless yarns, either."

"You care an awful lot for not caring," Link observed.

That was it. For all his rabbitlike agility, Link could not avoid the full fury of Ganondorf whirling around to pluck him like an offending weed from the dirt. Ganondorf hoisted him over his shoulder like so much baggage, where the boy struggled in terror. "It's a good thing I know someone who cares for you," said Ganondorf. "And for your sake, I hope he cares deeply."

Zelda had even been so bold as to mention how inopportune a rescue would be, to say to Ganondorf's very face how relieved she was to be in his care, safe from Hyrule's grasp. Ganondorf hadn't entertained that she meant to orchestrate her own freedom, instead. He could have kicked himself. Of course she was going to escape on her own. How could he have underestimated her strength of will?

Insufferable woman!

"I will have no more of your, and Impaz' attempts to manipulate me," said Ganondorf. "This is the way to get some honesty out of that son-of-keese father of yours."

Ganondorf hardly had finished when out of the darkness of a thin alley, something long and pale snaked from the shadows and curled around his throat. Choking in surprise at its sudden, frightening strength, Ganondorf found himself hauled into the close and dark quarters of a crevasse barely wide enough for him to turn sideways. In fact, he was nearly stuck; unable to twist around to draw his sword, not that he could in the first place with Link gripped in his one good hand. He scratched helplessly with his capped arm at what he first thought was a rope.

It was hair, a long, twisting braid that tightened with a life of its own. If it was a serpent, its fang was a wickedly curved, heavy blade tied into the end: pressing lightly into the apple of his throat. Attached to that plaited noose was Impaz, the flush of fury plain to see under the glaze of skin. His eyes were more than bloodshot: they were crimson in rage. In one hand, he held a long, hooked knife that oozed a dark liquid from bottomless grooves: meant to tear the skin and invenomate as quickly as possible. In the other, he held a silk fan. In the low light only the tiniest glint from the spokes revealed that the thing was not only laced with razor wire, the leaves were blades themselves and when held in a fist, separated to become a claw of nightmares.

The most macabre corner of Ganondorf's mind wondered if the poison or the blood loss would kill first. The terrible animate braid tightened once again about his neck, the serrated needle plucking along his skin with frightening intimacy.

"Put my son down," said Impaz.

"After such negligence to send him with the King of Evil," Ganondorf choked, "you object?"

"Put my son down."

"Can you protect the wretch from his destiny, and the dangers that go with it?"

"Put my son down," warned Impaz, "Or I will put you down."

It was then that Ganondorf noticed the army of eyes staring out of the dark: staring, silent. They glinted as dully as their blades did, watching. Held back in shadows, only by Impaz himself. Women's eyes, the Naked Eye. More appeared, swarming like the most ravenous of cats. Return the brother, they said, in an unspoken language that Ganondorf found he recognized, from long, long ago. It was a sort of understanding that he was an orphan from, was startled to see again in the waking world. It cut to the heart of him: peeling him like a withered apple until his flesh fell away and the seeds of his memory and mind were exposed to the dry, choking air.

"I will put you down and there'll not be enough shreds of you even for Din to piece together."

Ganondorf dropped Link. The boy slid in terror off of his shoulder, and seemed to ooze behind his father: slinking so low in fear that he seemed almost part of the ground itself. The Sheikah's demeanor changed drastically as the long braid went limp, and then slithered away from Ganondorf's neck. It twisted itself up upon Impaz' head once more, and wagged passively with the man's swaying posture.

"Thank you," said the Sheikah. His girls vanished like a flight of starlings, winging off to places unknown. "Now, we might as well get to business."

"No. Stop." said Ganondorf. "You have much to answer for. I will not be led around like a-"

"It was necessary to move you to eliminate Blind, before the deal could be made," said Impaz quite sharply. "I feared for Zelda's safety; while she may believe that people get what they pay for, Blind had other ideas. There was no pressure on him to deliver her alive, merely to keep her alive as long as it was possible to extract information and possibly wealth from her. When he discovered there was no chance at present of retaking her kingdom, he'd have cut his losses rather than harbor a fugitive."

Ganondorf folded his arms, rubbing his sore and somewhat weeping stump. He must have banged it earlier, in the fight. Blue potion really didn't know what to do with pre-existing conditions, it seemed.

"You must leave this city," said Impaz. "In fact, everyone must."

"Where there's a deal, there are two parties," replied Ganondorf, the light of understanding filtering over his mind. "I expect Hyrule has come to collect."

"Yes, and on swift horses. They will be here within a day." The Sheikah paused. "I have riled the folk here into building a blockade, at least. But that will not last for long against trained soldiers. I thank you for your work, Evil One. I can trust you to keep Zelda in your care, for at least a little while longer."

Ganondorf's brow crushed down upon the offending statement. "Do you see any Zelda with me?"

Impaz waved the comment off. "It you don't have her now, you'll acquire her soon enough. You always do; you can hardly expect me to tell you how to do your business, can you?"

"Then, stop wasting my time," said Ganondorf. "But tell me what will become of the boy."

"My son is no concern of yours," said Impaz warningly.

"No, I think he is," said Ganondorf. "When your son happens to be the Hero of this age."

The answer came in the form of silence. Impaz threw down a flash of smoke and light nearly before Ganondorf's voice faded from the alley, and he was gone. With Link, as well; the alley was empty by the time the spots faded from Ganondorf's eyes.

Ganondorf kicked the unlucky foundation of a mud-daube house. It cracked under his steel-toed boot. The afternoon had been a waste, all of it! No Zelda, no leads as to her location, and now soldiers approached...! In dealing with the Sheikah and that damnable son, he was no closer to his goal than before. That was the way with them, he swore, and stepped out into the town's chaos to at least call the damage that had been done.

Wretched and treacherous he was, there was no doubt that the Sheikah had been busy. The town surrendered its precious artifacts: wood, stone, iron, to build a blockade before their only gates. It was a pathetic defense, but it was all an island of wretches amidst the resource-poor wastes could manage. The road skirted where the moors met the sandy desert, which faded into a slurry of quicksand and mire on the village's opposite side: the side they'd approached, Ganondorf thought, when he and Zelda had discovered the settlement in the first place. But there would be no soldiers from there.

And the townsfolk were terrified. Ganondorf understood. The outrage of marching soldiers on their previously-safe haven, and they'd never know it was one of their own that had drawn them close in the first place. But, all of them were fool Hylians, and full of ego. They cried out for the meager prices on their own heads, bawled about their brats who'd be left after their outlaw sires had been arrested and executed. None of them knew that it was Zelda, not their own worthless crimes, that Hyrule had finally came for.

Ganondorf could feel the blood pound in his head as he traced her probable steps. She had been in Blind's grasp, and the bow she had carried was the rough-strung one taken from their rooms, with the last of the chicken-fletched arrows. Those stuck in Ganondorf's mind: clear in detail amidst the haze of his fury. Then, he had lost her whilst injured and sightless, but he assumed she had fled.

And then... where?! Ganondorf shoved men out of his way as he tore down the narrow avenue, feeling his the knuckles of his one fist clench, his skin boil in fury.

No. Think. He forced what felt like molten lead back inside his mind, and threw himself at the problem. Old bow. Old money. Only a few arrows. She hadn't had the cache that the Sheikah had spoken of on her. Which meant that she would have ran to collect it. Ganondorf did not know where it was hidden, but had a guess about what was in it. Arms, food, water, supplies for the road, an easy escape.

All of which were far too much for her to carry in her own two arms.

Ganondorf bolted to the stables, plowing up the avenue and leaving a till of upturned bodies in his wake. He did not pray, but demanded of the cosmos and the universe itself that he was not too late to catch her. It took too long for his liking to reach the tired floorboards of the barn. By chance, two armed men burst into the stable on the other end, just as Ganondorf arrived. The looks on their faces were rapacious and panicked; Ganondorf supposed that while half the town threw its belongings into defending what little they all shared, the other half would loot the corpse and run for it. One of the men was laden with spoils already, and immediately sprang to one of the stable doors to find a beast to haul it away for him.

Or maybe their plan was simpler: Steal a horse, and get out while they could.

There was only one horse left for the three of them, however. Ganondorf, and the other men, they all ran at the stall with wild yells, scrambling for the lock. Ganondorf drew his sword, and aimed to slit the nearest's throat. In poor-handed aim, he missed and instead beheaded the man. Such was life. He turned to the next one as the hot blood pooled about his boots, sprayed his trousers. The man went chalk-white, and cried out in perfect horror.

"Monster!"

The scream cut short with a gurgle as two steel hooks sprouted from the man's neck. Hoof-picks, Ganondorf realized. Mundane tools, in the hands of an old man; Talon had been so quiet that Ganondorf almost suspected magic. But the horse thief fell to the floor just the same, and Talon's sightless gaze averted the act entirely, staring at Ganondorf's calculated height. He hunched, shrinking back down from the shadow of an assassin, into the aged stable master once again.

"It's a dreadful thing," said Talon calmly. "That's the fourth one in the past hour. Is there some sort of commotion? I've sold more animals today than I ever have before, and turned away even more unruly men."

"Yes. Hyrule is coming, old man. You'd be wise to leave," said Ganondorf, though he noted that Talon with his wrinkles was practically a babe compared to the annals of his own antiquity. "Have any thieves been a woman?"

"No, the woman wisely decided to pay," Talon said. "For the finest of the lot, too. Too big for her, and I told her so, but-"

"Did she carry a load?" Ganondorf snapped, unwilling to tolerate Talon's nattering. "Did you hear her hitch supplies to the beast?"

"No. She paid, and then was off with it," said Talon. "Are you after her?"

But that was enough for Ganondorf. He left Talon there, waiting for an answer that would never come. There wasn't time; Zelda already had a horse, and likely was loading it with her cache, or had already finished. There was only one way she could go now, and if he was too late there was no way to catch her. Ganondorf ran, rasping hard with heavy footfalls, to the gate of the settlement. Every second that slipped by felt like a terrible, looming failure. If she was already gone, how would he track her? How, with riders and dogs and only-the-sands-know what else behind her?

The blockade loomed over Ganondorf. If his magic had been up to it, all of it could have been gone. The whole place could have been a crater in an instant. Instead, he elbowed a panicked builder aside, and began to climb. With only one hand, the speed of his progress worried him. But, Ganondorf finally stood before the gates of the settlement. If she hadn't beaten him, she would pass here. She HAD to pass here...

Faintly, he heard hooves above the clatter of tools.

_Yes_.

The long, loping strides cleared the barricade with a great leap; the grey horse came into view. Zelda took a soldiers' seat, riding deep into the saddle, wrapping her too-short legs around the wide barrel of the horse's chest. Behind her, Ganondorf could see the beginnings of a storm.

He hadn't really thought his through, he realized. A mortal man, even a large one, could not easily stand against a speeding horse! She blew by him, nearly knocking him to the ground. Ganondorf scowled at her retreating form, feeling the metal cork on his dark power budge; he had to have her back, she could _not_ escape, he'd burn the road to ash if he had to, _so help him_...!

"Stop!"

The single word erupted from his throat, before he knew what he was doing, how fruitless an empty demand would be.

And, amazingly, Zelda _stopped_. How? Binding ritual, reversed? Sudden lapse in her sanity? The command of some mad god? What bizarre change in fortune could have _ever _persuaded her to obey such a command from him?

No, Zelda had not stopped, Ganondorf realized. Her mount had stopped. As Ganondorf neared, he noticed that her horse was the _same _horse, the same one that she'd been led in on. _Of course _she'd go for the familiar. Or perhaps she had appraised it as healthier or more fit; it HAD been doing well in the past month...

But it had been the same horse that he had experimented on, tried to enthrall as a beast in his service. No matter how Zelda kicked and pleaded, the animal wouldn't budge. All of that, the whole day's chase - remedied by an offhand, fruitless _try_.

"You...! What did you do?!"

Ganondorf yanked the reins out of her grasp. "Did you think I hadn't prepared for this?"

Zelda tried to dismount. Ganondorf pinned her to the horse's side with his off-arm. "There's no way you could have known, that you'd bewitch the very horse I'd take," she spat. "It's not possible."

"Rethink your possibilities," said Ganondorf, taking advantage of his bluff. "You will find them now... reduced."

He rubbed his new horse's nose briefly. It stood quietly, with watchful eyes. Good work, he rewarded it. You are an obedient slave. It was somewhat troubling that upon the beast's faint web of magics, it was not the binding ritual that rose to the surface, but the gratitude, the release from torment. A broken switch, and a missing stablehand. A reward, it impressed to him, for that small kindness.

Zelda didn't have to know of that. He slid her small feet from the stirrups and lengthened them to their limit. Then, grabbing a hold of the reins and the crest of the horse in one hand, he hauled himself astride. Ganondorf swung around, pushing Zelda up on the low pommel of the riding saddle. The bewitched horse didn't stagger under the new weight. It was strong enough now, even if it looked too thin to bear it. That would change, once he got it out of this terrible salt-grass; that was no way to feed a beast like this one.

"Certainly if you plan on weighing the animal down," she hissed. "You'll never outrun them."

"Yes," Ganondorf agreed. "But I do not run."

Riding would be the same as if he had a sword in hand. In this case, his right arm held fast to the tense Zelda. He could feel her body wind like a wire in the cold. Ganondorf took the plodding walk to a long-stride lope, Ganondorf's legs stretching down and around the beast's barrel to urge it on. Soon the town shrank behind them, and the track roughened. Fewer feet had beaten it, and the horse's quickening gait threw up a cloud of black siltdust.

Two ranks of shining bodies appeared as they descended the hill, far closer than the distant marching threat than Ganondorf was expecting. But cutting it leagues close, or meters close, it hardly mattered.

"Are you going to turn off the road?"

"Not through the mire, or the dunes."

"How will you get around them, then?"

"Not around," said Ganondorf.

Zelda's voice choked in horror. "Through," she said.

Only half a kilometer away, now. The men yelled, raised their pikes in protest and alarm. Ganondorf knew they'd be seen. Which would be his message to them, he thought; no one would think that he could be contained by a simple-minded back-fens thief and his gang, or that Zelda would be taken so easily from his grasp. Let the King know not to trifle with me. He gritted his teeth as the doubt clawed at his mind; Calas knew Ganondorf to be the worse swordsman, to have fled the castle, and now to be seen fleeing a second time-

"Ganondorf! You had some sort of plan! They're getting closer! Are you even there?"

Reality sharpened around him, and in momentary confusion, Ganondorf felt almost a passenger in his own body; yes, he had an idea to get here, and what he planned... but how to go through the ranks of soldiers? Zelda didn't seem to take it so much for granted, and he realized with his heartbeat hammering in his ears that she was right to.

"Draw my sword," Ganondorf ordered, gripping the reigns. "I must ride. You must fight."

She twisted back to stare at him, brow twisted into a baffled knot. Ganondorf felt himself scowl back at her, and motioned with his eyes to his left side. He was loath to have to 'trust' her so soon after an escape, much less with a weapon. Quickly, he dropped and knotted the reins with one practiced fist and squeezed the horse forward, clamping his knees; the pace lifted.

"My hand is full," he said, calling forth a small ball of flame and smoke.

With a nod, Zelda pulled the long, slim blade from his belt, awkwardly turning it in her right hand to face the enemy. Only yards away. Meters. None.

Ganondorf struck with smoke and ash, not fire; his diminished strength sufficed. The brief flash of flame was enough to terrify the men into breaking ranks, and the heavy smog did well to shut their eyes and choke them into submission. The bulk of the horse and the bite of the blade in Zelda's wan, tight-gripped fist parted the way. There was a scream, perhaps two men perished, and then suddenly light and clear road exploded back into sight. The frantic clatter of hooves tore them away from the scene; Zelda craning her neck around Ganondorf's bulk, to see the swirling black cloud slowly vanishing in the wind.

"We don't have much time," she said tiredly. "I expected a chase, but not like this."

Ganondorf finally turned off of the road, and into the shadow of dirt and dunes. They traveled south.

–

They traveled further south in a day than they'd traveled west in their first march of exile. With a horse that hardly tired, their hellish pace shook any pursuers from their trail, or at least baffled them in harsh terrain of dry hills and dunes. Zelda had been silent nearly the entire day: all nerves, warm and shaking in Ganondorf's grasp.

Only when night had begun to fall and they'd made their fire-less camp, did she croak words out. "This is probably better," she admitted flatly.

That, Ganondorf had not expected, and hardly stopped to chew his hard rations before answering. "If you saw fit to submit, you should have never been so treacherous."

"You should not have been so _oblivious_!" Zelda said. "I could be rid of you, if that fool of a thief hadn't learned of who you were!"

"Explain to me everything. Then I will decide your fate."

"You're too dramatic, jailer," spat Zelda, with rare fury. "Either death by you, or death by Blind, or death at the hands of my countrymen... it hardly matters anymore."

Considering she likely had improvised a design for every aspect of their time in exile, Ganondorf was not satisfied with being called a 'jailer.' He felt more like a squire, chasing a falcon that had shrugged its hood and leathers. Zelda sighed, crossing her legs like a child. She swallowed her hard-tack of bread heavily. "It didn't take long to find someone who would help. He connected me to Blind. I would pay Blind a fee, he would take me from my room, and I would tell him royal secrets for which he could have extorted a fortune. He predictably involved Hyrule in this; he meant to cheat the crown out of the reward money, as well. I was contacted by additional benefactors, who planned a cache for my escape. I did not intend to stay with Blind, or honor his demands."

"And why would he let you go, so precious as you are?"

"You would kill him," Zelda explained, with startling plainness. "I convinced him that I could lose you by faking arson and abduction. Really, I can't think of anything that would cause you to seek and kill him more. I planned to be gone, by then."

"But that is not what happened," said Ganondorf, disgusted at her betrayal, but darkly intrigued by her designs. If he was an artist in lie-craft, she was a master. He began to wonder which of their exchanges in the inn-room had been real, and which she had staged to manipulate him, or if it was some perverse combination of the two.

"I didn't expect him to speak to soldiers of YOU," said Zelda. "You legacy is all but obliterated. I didn't predict Calas to revive it, to frighten his men with tales of the Dark Lord's atrocity. Did you know they think I summoned you up from hell?"

"I am perfectly capable of finding my way out on my own," Ganondorf pointed out.

"When Blind learned of WHO he had provoked, he decided that I had to be disposed of: to wash his hands of me, and avoid your wrath."

Zelda's voice flattened, until it reminded Ganondorf of wind through a hollow tree.

"He thought he could silence me, give my corpse to Hyrule quietly for reward, and you never would find me. He underestimated you."

"Clearly he had not been frightened ENOUGH. He thought to toy with me, when we fought."

"You were injured beyond sight and steady footing. You were as good as dead. It's an unfortunate miracle to see you still breathing."

"You don't know me very well," said Ganondorf, and even through the deepening evening he could see her flinch. But it was short-lived, and stoic.

Hers was a guarded sorrow. She chewed her small rations, and barely washed it down. She seemed... thin, he noticed, and sunken. Her plain, madder-dye dress hung limply from her shoulders, and her hair curled in tatters about her neck. Zelda had expended all her energy, Ganondorf thought, and after her failed defiance now had little to spare. Her fingers had blisters, from holding a bowstring and a needle.

She seemed acutely aware of his gaze upon her, though she made no protest and did not meet his eyes. Ganondorf knew how Hylian women were, what leers they endured from their men. Ganondorf unearthed the tiniest of memories, protected by a shell of time as delicate as an egg: one of his sisters and a rare offhand remark. How the Hylian women's eyes darted even in friendly streets, how they spoke in hushed whispers at times, and how they quieted like children before their husbands. Gerudo were not welcome in Castle Town except as women of perceived ill-virtue, and had little chance to see such things, and Ganondorf had barely been interested in the remark in his youth. Foolish youth.

Only now, centuries past the thought's vintage, did he realize that Zelda too was a Hylian woman of such make, despite her strength and her exceptional position as his nemesis. His continual failure to predict her movements suggested he had approached her incorrectly, that he knew less of her workings than he thought, even after hundreds of years.

Hundreds of years? Perhaps he had reached too far. He knew what the line of Zelda, of antiquity feared. What did this one small girl, a singular Zelda, need to be properly contained?

He wondered what she saw when she looked at him, and if it was the same as the King of Evil he meant to be, or the king of an entirely different sort of evil. Ganondorf thought of Calas, of the many ancient Hylian kings he had deposed in the past, and what they all had in common. Perhaps in each life, he had done Zelda a favor in getting rid of such fools. They were bad for the land, and only in this time did he realize how bad. Perhaps worse than he was.

But! His mind defended! You are not 'bad' for the land of Hyrule! You are its king, and you shall be again!

Ganondorf assured himself of this, and erased such errant doubts. And, as if she sensed his unease, Zelda spoke for the first time in long hours.

"I wish to make a deal with you."

"We know exactly what happened to the last man to bargain with you," replied Ganondorf. "Why should I expect your word hold now, Zelda?"

Zelda's stare met his own, startling him. He was almost ashamed of himself for suspecting womens' fears and troubles, when obviously she was no mere woman. Or was this yet another act of hers? Now that he knew the fullness of her skill at deception, he could not trust her face or her tone, and her words least of all.

"Because it must," she asserted. "This is all I have now."

Ganondorf scoffed. "What have you lost, between now and when I threw you from your blasted tower?"

"Hope," she said, "In my countrymen. At least those in the place, with the will to help me. But I'm not surprised you don't understand."

Her lip curled into a quiet sneer, a politician's sneer, that Ganondorf did not find acceptable on her face.

"'Queen' is not merely a position of power, nor is it merely a position of wealth, or of title, or of anything that can be bestowed upon a person. That is only one aspect, that Calas took from me. Another aspect is that of morale, the symbol that I am to the people; the connections I can make with what I am. The very fact I was queen gives me value, as an idea, to others."

Her thin arms clasped about her legs, in futile defense of her moment of weakness.

"Now I see that whatever I mean to them, it has changed. Or maybe, never what I thought it was in the first place."

Ganondorf's hand itched. However he liked seeing her so beaten, her tone was so very wrong. He settled to strike it out of her with words, despite the army of ants seething in his skin. "You take much of what you have for granted," he scoffed. "Even in exile, your mind is still a Zelda's mind. Your strength is that of Zelda, and your ways and will are those of Zelda. These are treasures that you smuggle, in ignorance, from your safe castle, and are at your disposal. I have leveled your lands with less. Don't be so foolish."

"Lord of Darkness, we agree on one thing at least," she said. "Removing Calas."

"I would replace him," Ganondorf clarified. "And you will die."

Zelda folder her thin fingers in her lap, knuckles pale as ash. "That is a sacrifice I am willing to make, for the sake of Hyrule."

"You would install a tyrant to depose a tyrant?"

"We will be tyrants all around by the end of this, however short-lived," said Zelda. "But there is something I must do first. Before you kill me, would you allow me a request?"

"I shouldn't," said Ganondorf. "But speak, if you think it makes any difference."

"The Hyrule you'll rule over will be barren, as long as the Gods disavow it... and me," said Zelda. "I'm not sure, but there is an ancient legend of Zelda, of my ancestors, that states as long as the Goddesses smile upon Hyrule, it will prosper."

Ganondorf swallowed the sticky dust in his mouth, as her gaze bored into his. He knew exactly what Zelda implied, the reason Hyrule continually fell into ruin, crumbled in his grasp. Why the Triforce in whole, heirloom of the heavens, was needed to rule the kingdom in proper. It had never occurred to him that Zelda could be as unloved by the heavens as he, for them to spite her land so.

He cast a poisonous eye skyward. How typical of Hylian gods to starve and wither the many, in protest of only a few. Or in his case, one.

In Zelda's case.

"In the ancient past, a Zelda shed her mortal presence to grow closer to the Gods, by bathing in sacred springs," Zelda explained. "I don't know if it will work. But I implore you now, to let me try, and at the very least know my country saw a tyrant in prosperity, rather than ruin."

"You wish to beg before them," said Ganondorf.

"I wish to claim from them my birthright," said Zelda. "If they do not think me worthy, I shall have to face them about it myself."

It was then, that Ganondorf realized _her perfect cage._

"Where are your sacred springs?" he asked, tempering his voice, keeping out the grin that he subdued.

"The first is deep in the forest, though I don't know where. Or if the forest that housed it still exists as it did in the past," said Zelda.

"Done. We ride in the morning."

Her face was worth the façade of compliance. All the centuries of nobility, reduced to the surprise of one girl. A clever girl, a cutthroat girl, but just one mortal with a gape of confusion that paid for half the humiliation he'd suffered thus far. "That's all?" she gasped, wringing her dress. "All I had to do was ask? After all of that? After months of working around your horrible inconvenience to find a way to escape, I only had to ask if you'd agree?"

"You are Hylian royalty," said Ganondorf, "I am not surprised that you are unused to the idea."

"You're one to talk," she mumbled, and sunk to the dry dirt. Shivering, she curled knees-to-breast and feigned to try at sleep. Ganondorf watched her until her act gave way to sincerity, and with satisfaction noted that she did not cry that night.

Her birthright is her collar and her shackle, her ancestry a vast chain-gang, he thought. She seeks the heavens, her Triforce, even more ardently than I do. For it is the cornerstone of her rule, and without her divinity, her kingdom is nothing.

If I seem eager to oblige, in providing her that service, she will stay within my sight without question. She has no other allies, and humoring her cost him nothing. He had planned to muster what was left of his army anyway, and if she wished to take detours, that would suit him just as well.

Ganondorf himself lay down, to sleep in anticipation of triumph.

May she lead me to more than just one golden piece, he thought.


End file.
